Driver Fatigue Monitoring System and Method

ABSTRACT

Method and system for monitoring a vehicle driver includes an optical imaging system that obtains images of the driver, and a processor coupled to the optical imaging system and arranged to analyze the images obtained by the optical imaging system to locate a head of the driver in the images and monitor the driver&#39;s head or a part thereof over time. The processor also determines, based on the monitoring of the driver&#39;s head or part thereof, whether the driver has lost the ability to operate the vehicle. A reactive component is affected by the processor&#39;s determination that the driver has lost the ability to operate the vehicle, and requires action by the driver to indicate regaining of the ability to operate the vehicle or exerting control over the vehicle to slow the vehicle and bring it to a stop.

CROSS REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS

This application is a:

1. a continuation-in-part (CIP) of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/058,706 filed Jan. 28, 2002 which is:

-   -   A. a CIP of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/543,678 filed         Apr. 7, 2000, now U.S. Pat. No. 6,412,813, which is a CIP of         U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/047,704 filed Mar. 25, 1998,         now U.S. Pat. No. 6,116,638, which is a CIP of U.S. patent         application Ser. No. 08/640,068 filed Apr. 30, 1996, now U.S.         Pat. No. 5,829,782, which is a continuation of U.S. patent         application Ser. No. 08/239,978 filed May 9, 1994, now         abandoned;     -   B. a CIP of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/639,299 filed         Aug. 15, 2000, now U.S. Pat. No. 6,422,595, which is:         -   1) a CIP of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 08/905,877             filed Aug. 4, 1997, now U.S. Pat. No. 6,186,537, which is a             continuation of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 08/505,036             filed Jul. 21, 1995, now U.S. Pat. No. 5,653,462, which is a             continuation of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 08/040,978             filed Mar. 31, 1993, now abandoned, which is a CIP of U.S.             patent application Ser. No. 07/878,571 filed May 5, 1992,             now abandoned;         -   2) a CIP of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/409,625             filed Oct. 1, 1999, now U.S. Pat. No. 6,270,116;         -   3) a CIP of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/448,337             filed Nov. 23, 1999, now U.S. Pat. No. 6,283,503; and         -   4) a CIP of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/448,338             filed Nov. 23, 1999, now U.S. Pat. No. 6,168,186; and     -   C. a CIP of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/891,432 filed         Jun. 26, 2001, now U.S. Pat. No. 6,513,833, which is a CIP of         U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/838,920 filed Apr. 20, 2001,         now U.S. Pat. No. 6,778,672, which is a CIP of U.S. patent         application Ser. No. 09/563,556 filed May 3, 2000, now U.S. Pat.         No. 6,474,683, which is a CIP of U.S. patent application Ser.         No. 09/437,535 filed Nov. 10, 1999, now U.S. Pat. No. 6,712,387,         which is a CIP of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/047,703         filed Mar. 25, 1998, now U.S. Pat. No. 6,039,139, which is:         -   1) a CIP of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 08/640,068             filed Apr. 30, 1996, now U.S. Pat. No. 5,829,782, the             history of which is set forth above;         -   2) a CIP of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 08/905,876             filed Aug. 4, 1997, now U.S. Pat. No. 5,848,802, which is a             continuation of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 08/505,036             filed Jul. 21, 1995, now U.S. Pat. No. 5,653,462, the             history of which is set forth above,

2. a CIP of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/940,881 filed Sep. 13, 2004 which is:

-   -   A. a CIP of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/639,303 filed         Aug. 16, 2000, now U.S. Pat. No. 6,910,711, which is:         -   1) a CIP of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 08/905,877             filed Aug. 4, 1997, now U.S. Pat. No. 6,186,537, the history             of which is set forth above;         -   2) a CIP of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/409,625             filed Oct. 1, 1999, now U.S. Pat. No. 6,270,116;         -   3) a CIP of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/448,337             filed Nov. 23, 1999, now U.S. Pat. No. 6,283,503; and         -   4) a CIP of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/448,338             filed Nov. 23, 1999, now U.S. Pat. No. 6,168,186;     -   B. a CIP of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/114,533 filed         Apr. 2, 2002, now U.S. Pat. No. 6,942,248;     -   C. a CIP of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/116,808 filed         Apr. 5, 2002, now U.S. Pat. No. 6,856,873, which is:         -   1) a CIP of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/838,919             filed Apr. 20, 2001, now U.S. Pat. No. 6,442,465, which is:             -   a. a CIP of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/389,947                 filed Sep. 3, 1999, now U.S. Pat. No. 6,393,133, which                 is a CIP of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/200,614,                 filed Nov. 30, 1998, now U.S. Pat. No. 6,141,432, which                 is a continuation of U.S. patent application Ser. No.                 08/474,786 filed Jun. 7, 1995, now U.S. Pat. No.                 5,845,000;             -   b. a CIP of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/765,559                 filed Jan. 19, 2001, now U.S. Pat. No. 6,553,296, which                 is a CIP of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/476,255                 filed Dec. 30, 1999, now U.S. Pat. No. 6,324,453, which                 claims priority under 35 U.S.C. §119(e) of U.S.                 provisional patent application Ser. No. 60/114,507 filed                 Dec. 31, 1998, now expired;         -   2) a CIP of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/925,043             filed Aug. 8, 2001, now U.S. Pat. No. 6,507,779, which is:             -   a. a CIP of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/765,559                 filed Jan. 19, 2001, now U.S. Pat. No. 6,553,296, the                 history of which is set forth above; and             -   b. a CIP of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/389,947                 filed Sep. 3, 1999, now U.S. Pat. No. 6,393,133, the                 history of which is set forth above;     -   D. a CIP of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/151,615 filed         May 20, 2002, now U.S. Pat. No. 6,820,897, which is a CIP of         U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/543,678 filed Apr. 7, 2000,         now U.S. Pat. No. 6,412,813, the history of which is set forth         above, and a CIP of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/891,432,         filed Jun. 26, 2001, now U.S. Pat. No. 6,513,833, the history of         which is set forth above;     -   E. a CIP of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/227,780 filed         Aug. 26, 2002, now U.S. Pat. No. 6,950,022, which is a CIP of         U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/838,920 filed Apr. 20, 2001,         now U.S. Pat. No. 6,778,672, the history of which is set forth         above;     -   F. a CIP of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/234,067 filed         Sep. 3, 2002, now U.S. Pat. No. 6,869,100, which is a CIP of         U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/778,137 filed Feb. 7, 2001,         now U.S. Pat. No. 6,513,830, which is a continuation of U.S.         patent application Ser. No. 08/905,877, filed Aug. 4, 1997, now         U.S. Pat. No. 6,186,537, the history of which is set forth         above; and     -   G. a CIP of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/365,129 filed         Feb. 12, 2003, now U.S. Pat. No. 7,134,687;     -   H. a CIP of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/805,903 filed         Mar. 22, 2004, now U.S. Pat. No. 7,050,897, which is a CIP of         U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/174,709, filed Jun. 19,         2002, now U.S. Pat. No. 6,735,506, which is a CIP of U.S. patent         application Ser. No. 10/114,533 filed Apr. 2, 2002, now U.S.         Pat. No. 6,942,248; and     -   I. a CIP of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/931,288 filed         Aug. 31, 2004, now U.S. Pat. No. 7,164,117;

3. a CIP of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/025,501 filed Jan. 3, 2005 which is:

-   -   A. a CIP of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/116,808 filed         Apr. 5, 2002, now U.S. Pat. No. 6,856,873, the history of which         is set forth above;     -   B. a CIP of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/413,426 filed         Apr. 14, 2003, now U.S. Pat. No. 7,413,426, which is a CIP of         U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/302,105 filed Nov. 22, 2002,         now U.S. Pat. No. 6,772,057;

4. a CIP of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/536,054 filed Sep. 28, 2006; and

5. a CIP of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/839,622 filed Aug. 16, 2007.

This application is related to U.S. patent application Ser. Nos. 08/474,782 filed Jun. 7, 1995, now U.S. Pat. No. 5,835,613, 09/047,703 filed Mar. 25, 1998, now U.S. Pat. No. 6,039,139, 11/455,497 filed Jun. 19, 2006, 11/502,039 filed Aug. 10, 2006, 11/538,934 filed Oct. 5, 2006, 11/558,314 filed Nov. 9, 2006, 11/558,996 filed Nov. 13, 2006, 11/614,121 filed Dec. 21, 2006 and 11/619,863 filed Jan. 4, 2007 on the grounds that they include common subject matter.

All of the above-mentioned applications and those applications mentioned therein are incorporated by reference herein.

FIELD OF THE INVENTION

The present invention relates generally to systems and methods for monitoring a driver of a vehicle to determine whether the driver is falling asleep or otherwise unable to operate the vehicle.

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION

Background of the invention is found in the parent applications, in particular the '786 application. All of the patents, patent applications, technical papers and other references mentioned below and in the parent applications are incorporated herein by reference in their entirety.

Possible definitions of terms used in the application are set forth in the '881 application, incorporated by reference herein.

Preferred embodiments of the invention are described below and unless specifically noted, it is the applicants' intention that the words and phrases in the specification and claims be given the ordinary and accustomed meaning to those of ordinary skill in the applicable art(s). If the applicants intend any other meaning, they will specifically state they are applying a special meaning to a word or phrase.

Likewise, applicants' use of the word “function” here is not intended to indicate that the applicants seek to invoke the special provisions of 35 U.S.C. §112, sixth paragraph, to define their invention. To the contrary, if applicants wish to invoke the provisions of 35 U.S.C. §112, sixth paragraph, to define their invention, they will specifically set forth in the claims the phrases “means for” or “step for” and a function, without also reciting in that phrase any structure, material or act in support of the function. Moreover, even if applicants invoke the provisions of 35 U.S.C. §112, sixth paragraph, to define their invention, it is the applicants' intention that their inventions not be limited to the specific structure, material or acts that are described in the preferred embodiments herein. Rather, if applicants claim their inventions by specifically invoking the provisions of 35 U.S.C. §112, sixth paragraph, it is nonetheless their intention to cover and include any and all structure, materials or acts that perform the claimed function, along with any and all known or later developed equivalent structures, materials or acts for performing the claimed function.

OBJECTS AND SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION

It is an object of the present invention to provide new and improved methods and systems for monitoring a driver of a vehicle to determine whether the driver is falling asleep or otherwise unable to operate the vehicle.

In order to achieve this object and possibly others, a vehicle including a system for monitoring a driver of the vehicle in accordance with the invention includes a frame, an optical imaging system arranged on the frame to obtain images of the driver, and a processor coupled to the optical imaging system and arranged to analyze the images obtained by the optical imaging system to locate a head of the driver in the images and monitor the driver's head or a part thereof over time. The processor also determines, based on the monitoring of the driver's head or part thereof, whether the driver has lost the ability to operate the vehicle, the lost of ability to operate the vehicle arising from the driver falling asleep or otherwise being incapacitated. A reactive component on the vehicle is affected by the determination by the processor that the driver has lost the ability to operate the vehicle, and requires action by the driver to indicate regaining of the ability to operate the vehicle or exerting control over the vehicle to slow the vehicle and bring it to a stop. The processor may use a trained pattern recognition technique when monitoring the driver's head or part thereof, e.g., when locating the head of the driver or part of the driver's head in the obtained images.

The optical imaging system may include a plurality of optical imagers spaced apart from one another and each positioned to obtain images of a face of the driver. The processor monitors the driver's head in one embodiment by determining a position of the head of the driver in images obtained at different times and analyzing the determined position of the head of the driver in the different images. In another, the processor monitors the driver's eyes by determining a position of the eyes of the driver in images obtained at different times and analyzing the determined position of the eyes of the driver in the different images. In yet another, the processor monitors the driver's eye lids by determining a position of the eye lids of the driver in images obtained at different times and analyzing the determined position of the eye lids of the driver in the different images.

The reactive component, of which there may be one or more, may be a warning light or a warning sound generating device. Each reactive component could be controlled differently depending on the monitoring of the driver's head or part thereof. One reactive component may be a button which, when pressed, indicates that the driver has regained the ability to operate the vehicle. The processor may also operate the horn and lights of the vehicle after determining that the driver is falling asleep or otherwise incapacitated to warn other vehicles of the inability of the driver to operate the vehicle.

A method for monitoring operation of a vehicle by a driver in accordance with the invention includes obtaining images of the driver from at least one vehicle-mounted optical imager, analyzing the obtained images to locate a head of the driver in the images, monitoring the driver's head or a part thereof over time, determining, based on the monitoring of the driver's head or part thereof, whether the driver has lost the ability to operate the vehicle, the lost of ability to operate the vehicle arising from the driver falling asleep or otherwise being incapacitated, and upon a determination that the driver has lost the ability to operate the vehicle, affecting a reactive component which requires action by the driver to indicate regaining of the ability to operate the vehicle or exerts control over the vehicle to slow the vehicle and bring it to a stop.

Monitoring the driver's head or a part thereof over time may entail training a pattern recognition technique to locate the head of the driver or other part of the driver. Monitoring the driver's head or a part thereof over time may entail determining a position of the head of the driver in images obtained at different times and analyzing the determined position of the head of the driver in the different images. When monitoring the driver's head or a part thereof over time comprises monitoring the driver's eyes, this monitoring may include determining a position of the eyes of the driver in images obtained at different times and analyzing the determined position of the eyes of the driver in the different images. When monitoring the driver's head or a part thereof over time entails monitoring the driver's eye lids, this monitoring may include determining a position of the eye lids of the driver in images obtained at different times and analyzing the determined position of the eye lids of the driver in the different images.

Additional features of the method include those described above for the system.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS

The following drawings are illustrative of embodiments of the system developed or adapted using the teachings of at least one of the inventions disclosed herein and are not meant to limit the scope of the invention as encompassed by the claims.

FIG. 1 is a side view with parts cutaway and removed of a vehicle showing the passenger compartment containing a rear facing child seat on the front passenger seat and a preferred mounting location for an occupant and rear facing child seat presence detector including an antenna field sensor and a resonator or reflector placed onto the forward most portion of the child seat.

FIG. 2 is a side view with parts cutaway and removed showing schematically the interface between the vehicle interior monitoring system of at least one of the inventions disclosed herein and the vehicle cellular or other telematics communication system including an antenna field sensor.

FIG. 3 is a side view with parts cutaway and removed of a vehicle showing the passenger compartment containing a box on the front passenger seat and a preferred mounting location for an occupant and rear facing child seat presence detector and including an antenna field sensor.

FIG. 4 is a side view with parts cutaway and removed of a vehicle showing the passenger compartment containing a driver and a preferred mounting location for an occupant identification system and including an inattentiveness response button.

FIG. 5 is a side view, with certain portions removed or cut away, of a portion of the passenger compartment of a vehicle showing several preferred mounting locations of occupant position sensors for sensing the position of the vehicle driver.

FIG. 6 shows a seated-state detecting unit in accordance with the present invention and the connections between ultrasonic or electromagnetic sensors, a weight sensor, a reclining angle detecting sensor, a seat track position detecting sensor, a heartbeat sensor, a motion sensor, a neural network, and an airbag system installed within a vehicular compartment.

FIG. 7 is a perspective view of a vehicle showing the position of the ultrasonic or electromagnetic sensors relative to the driver and front passenger seats.

FIG. 8A is a side planar view, with certain portions removed or cut away, of a portion of the passenger compartment of a vehicle showing several preferred mounting locations of interior vehicle monitoring sensors shown particularly for sensing the vehicle driver illustrating the wave pattern from a CCD or CMOS optical position sensor mounted along the side of the driver or centered above his or her head.

FIG. 8B is a view as in FIG. 8A illustrating the wave pattern from an optical system using an infrared light source and a CCD or CMOS array receiver using the windshield as a reflection surface and showing schematically the interface between the vehicle interior monitoring system of at least one of the inventions disclosed herein and an instrument panel mounted inattentiveness warning light or buzzer and reset button.

FIG. 8C is a view as in FIG. 8A illustrating the wave pattern from an optical system using an infrared light source and a CCD or CMOS array receiver where the CCD or CMOS array receiver is covered by a lens permitting a wide angle view of the contents of the passenger compartment.

FIG. 8D is a view as in FIG. 8A illustrating the wave pattern from a pair of small CCD or CMOS array receivers and one infrared transmitter where the spacing of the CCD or CMOS arrays permits an accurate measurement of the distance to features on the occupant.

FIG. 8E is a view as in FIG. 8A illustrating the wave pattern from a set of ultrasonic transmitter/receivers where the spacing of the transducers and the phase of the signal permits an accurate focusing of the ultrasonic beam and thus the accurate measurement of a particular point on the surface of the driver.

FIG. 9 is a circuit diagram of the seated-state detecting unit of the present invention.

FIGS. 10( a), 10(b) and 10(c) are each a diagram showing the configuration of the reflected waves of an ultrasonic wave transmitted from each transmitter of the ultrasonic sensors toward the passenger seat, obtained within the time that the reflected wave arrives at a receiver, FIG. 10( a) showing an example of the reflected waves obtained when a passenger is in a normal seated-state, FIG. 10( b) showing an example of the reflected waves obtained when a passenger is in an abnormal seated-state (where the passenger is seated too close to the instrument panel), and FIG. 10( c) showing a transmit pulse.

FIG. 11 is a flowchart showing the training steps of a neural network.

FIG. 12 is a side view, with certain portions removed or cut away, of a portion of the passenger compartment of a vehicle showing preferred mounting locations of optical interior vehicle monitoring sensors.

FIG. 13 is a perspective view of the interior of the passenger compartment of an automobile, with parts cut away and removed, showing a variety of transmitters that can be used in a phased array system.

FIG. 14 is a perspective view of a vehicle containing an adult occupant and an occupied infant seat on the front seat with the vehicle shown in phantom illustrating one preferred location of the transducers placed according to the methods taught in at least one of the inventions disclosed herein.

DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE INVENTION

A patent or literature referred to below is incorporated by reference in its entirety. Also, although many of the examples below relate to a particular vehicle, an automobile, the invention is not limited to any particular vehicle and is thus applicable to all relevant vehicles including shipping containers and truck trailers and to all compartments of a vehicle including, for example, the passenger compartment and the trunk of an automobile or truck.

“Or” and “and” as used in the specification and claims shall be read in the conjunctive and in the disjunctive wherever they appear as necessary to make the text inclusive rather than exclusive, and neither of these words shall be interpreted to limit the scope of the text.

1. General Occupant Sensors

Referring to the accompanying drawings, FIG. 1 is a side view, with parts cutaway and removed of a vehicle showing the passenger compartment, or passenger container, containing a rear facing child seat 2 on a front passenger seat 4 and a preferred mounting location for a first embodiment of a vehicle interior monitoring system in accordance with the invention. The interior monitoring system is capable of detecting the presence of an object, occupying objects such as a box, an occupant or a rear facing child seat 2, determining the type of object, determining the location of the object, and/or determining another property or characteristic of the object. A property of the object could be the orientation of a child seat, the velocity of an adult and the like. For example, the vehicle interior monitoring system can determine that an object is present on the seat, that the object is a child seat and that the child seat is rear-facing. The vehicle interior monitoring system could also determine that the object is an adult, that he is drunk and that he is out of position relative to the airbag.

In this embodiment, three transducers 6, 8 and 10 are used alone, or, alternately in combination with one or more antenna near field monitoring sensors or transducers, 12, 14 and 16, although any number of wave-transmitting transducers or radiation-receiving receivers may be used. Any plurality of such transducers or similar devices, e.g., transmitter/receiver assemblies, can be considered an array herein. Such transducers or receivers may be of the type that emit or receive a continuous signal, a time varying signal or a spatial varying signal such as in a scanning system and each may comprise only a transmitter which transmits energy, waves or radiation, only a receiver which receives energy, waves or radiation, both a transmitter and a receiver capable of transmitting and receiving energy, waves or radiation, an electric or electromagnetic field generating system, an electric field sensor, a capacitive sensor, or a self-tuning antenna-based sensor, weight sensor, chemical sensor, motion sensor or vibration sensor, for example.

One particular type of radiation-receiving receiver for use in the invention receives electromagnetic waves and another receives ultrasonic waves.

In an ultrasonic embodiment, transducer 8 can be used as a transmitter and transducers 6 and 10 can be used as receivers. Other combinations can be used such as where all transducers are transceivers (transmitters and receivers). For example, transducer 8 can be constructed to transmit ultrasonic energy toward the front passenger seat, which is modified, in this case by the occupying item of the passenger seat, i.e., the rear facing child seat 2, and the modified waves are received by the transducers 6 and 10, for example. A more common arrangement is where transducers 6, 8 and 10 are all transceivers. Modification of the ultrasonic energy may constitute reflection of the ultrasonic energy as the ultrasonic energy is reflected back by the occupying item of the seat. The waves received by transducers 6 and 10 vary with time depending on the shape of the object occupying the passenger seat, in this case the rear facing child seat 2. Each different occupying item will reflect back waves having a different pattern. Also, the pattern of waves received by transducer 6 will differ from the pattern received by transducer 10 in view of its different mounting location. This difference generally permits the determination of location of the reflecting surface (i.e., the rear facing child seat 2) through triangulation. Through the use of two transducers 6, 10, a sort of stereographic image is received by the two transducers and recorded for analysis by processor 20, which is coupled to the transducers 6, 8, 10, e.g., by wires or wirelessly. This image will differ for each object that is placed on the vehicle seat and it will also change for each position of a particular object and for each position of the vehicle seat. Elements 6, 8, 10, although described as transducers, are representative of any type of component used in a wave-based analysis technique. Also, although the example of an automobile passenger compartment has been shown, the same principle can be used for monitoring the interior of any vehicle including in particular shipping containers and truck trailers.

The positioning of the transducers 6, 10 to obtain a stereoscopic image may be achieved in a number of different ways. For example, each transducer 6, 10 may be arranged on perpendicular sides of a virtual rectangle so that one transducer 6 obtains images encompassing two dimensions while the other transducer 10 obtains images encompassing two dimensions which are not the same as the two dimensions encompassed by images obtained by transducer 6.

Wave-type sensors as the transducers 6, 8, 10 as well as electric field sensors 12, 14, 16 are mentioned above. Electric field sensors and wave sensors are sometimes similar from the point of view of sensing the presence of an occupant in a vehicle. In both cases, a time varying electric field, a form of a time-varying signal, is generated and directed into the volume of the passenger compartment and then disturbed or modified by the presence of the occupant. Different occupants or occupying items will cause different disturbances or modifications. At high frequencies in the visual, infrared and high frequency radio wave region, the sensor is based on its capability to sense a change of wave characteristics of the electromagnetic field, such as amplitude, phase or frequency. As the frequency drops, other characteristics of the field are measured. At still lower frequencies, the occupant's dielectric properties modify parameters of the reactive electric field in the occupied space between or near the plates of a capacitor. In this latter case, the sensor senses the change in charge distribution on the capacitor plates by measuring, for example, the current wave magnitude or phase in the electric circuit that drives the capacitor. These measured parameters are directly connected with parameters of the displacement current in the occupied space. In all cases, the presence of the occupant reflects, absorbs or modifies the waves or variations in the electric field in the space occupied by the occupant.

For ultrasonic systems, the “image” recorded from each ultrasonic transducer/receiver, is actually a time series of digitized data of the amplitude of the received signal versus time. Since there are two receivers, two time series are obtained which are processed by the processor 20. The processor 20 may include electronic circuitry and associated, embedded software. Processor 20 constitutes one form of generating means in accordance with the invention which generates information about the occupancy of the passenger compartment based on the waves received by the transducers 6, 8, 10.

When different objects are placed on the front passenger seat, the images from transducers 6, 8, 10 for example, are different but there are also similarities between all images of rear facing child seats, for example, regardless of where on the vehicle seat it is placed and regardless of what company manufactured the child seat. Alternately, there will be similarities between all images of people sitting on the seat regardless of what they are wearing, their age or size. The problem is to find the “rules” which differentiate the images of one type of object from the images of other types of objects, e.g., which differentiate the occupant images from the rear facing child seat images. The similarities of these images for various child seats are frequently not obvious to a person looking at plots of the time series and thus computer algorithms are developed to sort out the various patterns. For a more detailed discussion of pattern recognition see U.S. Pat. No. RE 37,260.

The determination of these rules is important to the pattern recognition techniques used in at least one of the inventions disclosed herein. In general, three approaches have been useful, artificial intelligence, fuzzy logic and artificial neural networks (including cellular and modular or combination neural networks and support vector machines—although additional types of pattern recognition techniques may also be used, such as sensor fusion). In some implementations of at least one of the inventions disclosed herein, such as the determination that there is an object in the path of a closing window as described below, the rules are sufficiently obvious that a trained researcher can sometimes look at the returned signals and devise a simple algorithm to make the required determinations. In others, such as the determination of the presence of a rear facing child seat or of an occupant, artificial neural networks can be used to determine the rules. One such set of neural network software for determining the pattern recognition rules is available from the International Scientific Research, Inc. of Panama City, Panama.

Electromagnetic energy based occupant sensors exist that use many portions of the electromagnetic spectrum. A system based on the ultraviolet, visible or infrared portions of the spectrum generally operate with a transmitter and a receiver of reflected radiation. The receiver may be a camera or a photo detector such as a pin or avalanche diode as described in above-referenced patents and patent applications. At other frequencies, the absorption of the electromagnetic energy is primarily used and at still other frequencies the capacitance or electric field influencing effects are used. Generally, the human body will reflect, scatter, absorb or transmit electromagnetic energy in various degrees depending on the frequency of the electromagnetic waves. All such occupant sensors are included herein.

In an embodiment wherein electromagnetic energy is used, it is to be appreciated that any portion of the electromagnetic signals that impinges upon, surrounds or involves a body portion of the occupant is at least partially absorbed by the body portion. Sometimes, this is due to the fact that the human body is composed primarily of water, and that electromagnetic energy of certain frequencies is readily absorbed by water. The amount of electromagnetic signal absorption is related to the frequency of the signal, and size or bulk of the body portion that the signal impinges upon. For example, a torso of a human body tends to absorb a greater percentage of electromagnetic energy than a hand of a human body.

Thus, when electromagnetic waves or energy signals are transmitted by a transmitter, the returning waves received by a receiver provide an indication of the absorption of the electromagnetic energy. That is, absorption of electromagnetic energy will vary depending on the presence or absence of a human occupant, the occupant's size, bulk, surface reflectivity, etc. depending on the frequency, so that different signals will be received relating to the degree or extent of absorption by the occupying item on the seat. The receiver will produce a signal representative of the returned waves or energy signals which will thus constitute an absorption signal as it corresponds to the absorption of electromagnetic energy by the occupying item in the seat.

One or more of the transducers 6, 8, 10 can also be image-receiving devices, such as cameras, which take images of the interior of the passenger compartment. These images can be transmitted to a remote facility to monitor the passenger compartment or can be stored in a memory device for use in the event of an accident, i.e., to determine the status of the occupant(s) of the vehicle prior to the accident. In this manner, it can be ascertained whether the driver was falling asleep, talking on the phone, etc.

A memory device for storing images of the passenger compartment, and also for receiving and storing any other information, parameters and variables relating to the vehicle or occupancy of the vehicle, may be in the form of a standardized “black box” (instead of or in addition to a memory part in a processor 20). The IEEE Standards Association is currently beginning to develop an international standard for motor vehicle event data recorders. The information stored in the black box and/or memory unit in the processor 20, can include the images of the interior of the passenger compartment as well as the number of occupants and the health state of the occupant(s). The black box would preferably be tamper-proof and crash-proof and enable retrieval of the information after a crash.

Transducer 8 can also be a source of electromagnetic radiation, such as an LED, and transducers 6 and 10 can be CMOS, CCD imagers or other devices sensitive to electromagnetic radiation or fields. This “image” or return signal will differ for each object that is placed on the vehicle seat, or elsewhere in the vehicle, and it will also change for each position of a particular object and for each position of the vehicle seat or other movable objects within the vehicle. Elements 6, 8, 10, although described as transducers, are representative of any type of component used in a wave-based or electric field analysis technique, including, e.g., a transmitter, receiver, antenna or a capacitor plate.

Transducers 12, 14 and 16 can be antennas placed in the seat and instrument panel, or other convenient location within the vehicle, such that the presence of an object, particularly a water-containing object such as a human, disturbs the near field of the antenna. This disturbance can be detected by various means such as with Micrel parts MICREF102 and MICREF104, which have a built-in antenna auto-tune circuit. Note, these parts cannot be used as is and it is necessary to redesign the chips to allow the auto-tune information to be retrieved from the chip.

Other types of transducers can be used along with the transducers 6, 8, 10 or separately and all are contemplated by at least one of the inventions disclosed herein. Such transducers include other wave devices such as radar or electronic field sensing systems such as described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,366,241, 5,602,734, 5,691,693, 5,802,479, 5,844,486, 5,948,031, 6,014,602 and 6,275,146. Another technology, for example, uses the fact that the content of the near field of an antenna affects the resonant tuning of the antenna. Examples of such a device are shown as antennas 12, 14 and 16 in FIG. 1. By going to lower frequencies, the near field range is increased and also at such lower frequencies, a ferrite-type antenna could be used to minimize the size of the antenna. Other antennas that may be applicable for a particular implementation include dipole, microstrip, patch, Yagi etc. The frequency transmitted by the antenna can be swept and the (VSWR) voltage and current in the antenna feed circuit can be measured. Classification by frequency domain is then possible. That is, if the circuit is tuned by the antenna, the frequency can be measured to determine the object in the field.

An alternate system is shown in FIG. 2, which is a side view showing schematically the interface between the vehicle interior monitoring system of at least one of the inventions disclosed herein and the vehicle cellular or other communication system 32, such as a satellite based system such as that supplied by Skybitz, having an associated antenna 34. In this view, an adult occupant 30 is shown sitting on the front passenger seat 4 and two transducers 6 and 8 are used to determine the presence (or absence) of the occupant on that seat 4. One of the transducers 8 in this case acts as both a transmitter and receiver while the other transducer 6 acts only as a receiver. Alternately, transducer 6 could serve as both a transmitter and receiver or the transmitting function could be alternated between the two devices. Also, in many cases, more that two transmitters and receivers are used and in still other cases, other types of sensors, such as weight, chemical, radiation, vibration, acoustic, seatbelt tension sensor or switch, heartbeat, self tuning antennas (12, 14), motion and seat and seatback position sensors, are also used alone or in combination with the transducers 6 and 8. As is also the case in FIG. 1, the transducers 6 and 8 are attached to the vehicle embedded in the A-pillar and headliner trim, where their presence is disguised, and are connected to processor 20 that may also be hidden in the trim as shown or elsewhere. Other mounting locations can also be used as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. RE 37,260.

The transducers 6 and 8 in conjunction with the pattern recognition hardware and software described below enable the determination of the presence of an occupant within a short time after the vehicle is started. The software is implemented in processor 20 and is packaged on a printed circuit board or flex circuit along with the transducers 6 and 8. Similar systems can be located to monitor the remaining seats in the vehicle, also determine the presence of occupants at the other seating locations and this result is stored in the computer memory, which is part of each monitoring system processor 20. Processor 20 thus enables a count of the number of occupants in the vehicle to be obtained by addition of the determined presence of occupants by the transducers associated with each seating location, and in fact, can be designed to perform such an addition. the principles illustrated for automobile vehicles are applicable by those skilled in the art to other vehicles such as shipping containers or truck trailers and to other compartments of an automotive vehicle such as the vehicle trunk.

For a general object, transducers 6, 8, 9, 10 can also be used to determine the type of object, determine the location of the object, and/or determine another property or characteristic of the object. A property of the object could be the orientation of a child seat, the velocity of an adult and the like. For example, the transducers 6, 8, 9, 10 can be designed to enable a determination that an object is present on the seat, that the object is a child seat and that the child seat is rear-facing.

The transducers 6 and 8 are attached to the vehicle buried in the trim such as the A-pillar trim, where their presence can be disguised, and are connected to processor 20 that may also be hidden in the trim as shown (this being a non-limiting position for the processor 20). The A-pillar is the roof support pillar that is closest to the front of the vehicle and which, in addition to supporting the roof, also supports the front windshield and the front door. Other mounting locations can also be used. For example, transducers 6, 8 can be mounted inside the seat (along with or in place of transducers 12 and 14), in the ceiling of the vehicle, in the B-pillar, in the C-pillar and in the doors. Indeed, the vehicle interior monitoring system in accordance with the invention may comprise a plurality of monitoring units, each arranged to monitor a particular seating location. In this case, for the rear seating locations, transducers might be mounted in the B-pillar or C-pillar or in the rear of the front seat or in the rear side doors. Possible mounting locations for transducers, transmitters, receivers and other occupant sensing devices are disclosed in above-referenced patent applications and all of these mounting locations are contemplated for use with the transducers described herein.

The cellular phone or other communications system 32 outputs to an antenna 34. The transducers 6, 8, 12 and 14 in conjunction with the pattern recognition hardware and software, which is implemented in processor 20 and is packaged on a printed circuit board or flex circuit along with the transducers 6 and 8, determine the presence of an occupant within a few seconds after the vehicle is started, or within a few seconds after the door is closed. Similar systems located to monitor the remaining seats in the vehicle, also determine the presence of occupants at the other seating locations and this result is stored in the computer memory which is part of each monitoring system processor 20.

Periodically and in particular in the event of an accident, the electronic system associated with the cellular phone system 32 interrogates the various interior monitoring system memories and arrives at a count of the number of occupants in the vehicle, and optionally, even makes a determination as to whether each occupant was wearing a seatbelt and if he or she is moving after the accident. The phone or other communications system then automatically dials the EMS operator (such as 911 or through a telematics service such as OnStar®) and the information obtained from the interior monitoring systems is forwarded so that a determination can be made as to the number of ambulances and other equipment to send to the accident site, for example. Such vehicles will also have a system, such as the global positioning system, which permits the vehicle to determine its exact location and to forward this information to the EMS operator. Other systems can be implemented in conjunction with the communication with the emergency services operator. For example, a microphone and speaker can be activated to permit the operator to attempt to communicate with the vehicle occupant(s) and thereby learn directly of the status and seriousness of the condition of the occupant(s) after the accident.

Thus, in basic embodiments of the invention, wave or other energy-receiving transducers are arranged in the vehicle at appropriate locations, trained if necessary depending on the particular embodiment, and function to determine whether a life form is present in the vehicle and if so, how many life forms are present and where they are located etc. To this end, transducers can be arranged to be operative at only a single seating location or at multiple seating locations with a provision being made to eliminate a repetitive count of occupants. A determination can also be made using the transducers as to whether the life forms are humans, or more specifically, adults, child in child seats, etc. As noted herein, this is possible using pattern recognition techniques. Moreover, the processor or processors associated with the transducers can be trained to determine the location of the life forms, either periodically or continuously or possibly only immediately before, during and after a crash. The location of the life forms can be as general or as specific as necessary depending on the system requirements, i.e., a determination can be made that a human is situated on the driver's seat in a normal position (general) or a determination can be made that a human is situated on the driver's seat and is leaning forward and/or to the side at a specific angle as well as the position of his or her extremities and head and chest (specifically). The degree of detail is limited by several factors, including, for example, the number and position of transducers and training of the pattern recognition algorithm(s).

In addition to the use of transducers to determine the presence and location of occupants in a vehicle, other sensors could also be used. For example, a heartbeat sensor which determines the number and presence of heartbeat signals can also be arranged in the vehicle, which would thus also determine the number of occupants as the number of occupants would be equal to the number of heartbeat signals detected. Conventional heartbeat sensors can be adapted to differentiate between a heartbeat of an adult, a heartbeat of a child and a heartbeat of an animal. As its name implies, a heartbeat sensor detects a heartbeat, and the magnitude and/or frequency thereof, of a human occupant of the seat, if such a human occupant is present. The output of the heartbeat sensor is input to the processor of the interior monitoring system. One heartbeat sensor for use in the invention may be of the types as disclosed in McEwan (U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,573,012 and 5,766,208). The heartbeat sensor can be positioned at any convenient position relative to the seats where occupancy is being monitored. A preferred location is within the vehicle seatback.

An alternative way to determine the number of occupants is to monitor the weight being applied to the seats, i.e., each seating location, by arranging weight sensors at each seating location which might also be able to provide a weight distribution of an object on the seat. Analysis of the weight and/or weight distribution by a predetermined method can provide an indication of occupancy by a human, an adult or child, or an inanimate object.

Another type of sensor which is not believed to have been used in an interior monitoring system previously is a micropower impulse radar (MIR) sensor which determines motion of an occupant and thus can determine his or her heartbeat (as evidenced by motion of the chest). Such an MIR sensor can be arranged to detect motion in a particular area in which the occupant's chest would most likely be situated or could be coupled to an arrangement which determines the location of the occupant's chest and then adjusts the operational field of the MIR sensor based on the determined location of the occupant's chest. A motion sensor utilizing a micro-power impulse radar (MIR) system as disclosed, for example, in McEwan (U.S. Pat. No. 5,361,070), as well as many other patents by the same inventor.

Motion sensing is accomplished by monitoring a particular range from the sensor as disclosed in that patent. MIR is one form of radar which has applicability to occupant sensing and can be mounted at various locations in the vehicle. It has an advantage over ultrasonic sensors in that data can be acquired at a higher speed and thus the motion of an occupant can be more easily tracked. The ability to obtain returns over the entire occupancy range is somewhat more difficult than with ultrasound resulting in a more expensive system overall. MIR has additional advantages in lack of sensitivity to temperature variation and has a comparable resolution to about 40 kHz ultrasound. Resolution comparable to higher frequency ultrasound is also possible. Additionally, multiple MIR sensors can be used when high speed tracking of the motion of an occupant during a crash is required since they can be individually pulsed without interfering with each through time division multiplexing.

An alternative way to determine motion of the occupant(s) is to monitor the weight distribution of the occupant whereby changes in weight distribution after an accident would be highly suggestive of movement of the occupant. A system for determining the weight distribution of the occupants could be integrated or otherwise arranged in the seats such as the front seat 4 of the vehicle and several patents and publications describe such systems.

More generally, any sensor which determines the presence and health state of an occupant can also be integrated into the vehicle interior monitoring system in accordance with the invention. For example, a sensitive motion sensor can determine whether an occupant is breathing and a chemical sensor can determine the amount of carbon dioxide, or the concentration of carbon dioxide, in the air in the passenger compartment of the vehicle which can be correlated to the health state of the occupant(s). The motion sensor and chemical sensor can be designed to have a fixed operational field situated where the occupant's mouth is most likely to be located. In this manner, detection of carbon dioxide in the fixed operational field could be used as an indication of the presence of a human occupant in order to enable the determination of the number of occupants in the vehicle. In the alternative, the motion sensor and chemical sensor can be adjustable and adapted to adjust their operational field in conjunction with a determination by an occupant position and location sensor which would determine the location of specific parts of the occupant's body, e.g., his or her chest or mouth. Furthermore, an occupant position and location sensor can be used to determine the location of the occupant's eyes and determine whether the occupant is conscious, i.e., whether his or her eyes are open or closed or moving.

The use of chemical sensors can also be used to detect whether there is blood present in the vehicle, for example, after an accident. Additionally, microphones can detect whether there is noise in the vehicle caused by groaning, yelling, etc., and transmit any such noise through the cellular or other communication connection to a remote listening facility (such as operated by OnStar®).

In FIG. 3, a view of the system of FIG. 1 is illustrated with a box 28 shown on the front passenger seat in place of a rear facing child seat. The vehicle interior monitoring system is trained to recognize that this box 28 is neither a rear facing child seat nor an occupant and therefore it is treated as an empty seat and the deployment of the airbag or other occupant restraint device is suppressed. For other vehicles, it may be that just the presence of a box or its motion or chemical or radiation effluents that are desired to be monitored. The auto-tune antenna-based system 12, 14 is particularly adept at making this distinction particularly if the box 28 does not contain substantial amounts of water. Although a simple implementation of the auto-tune antenna system is illustrated, it is of course possible to use multiple antennas located in the seat 4 and elsewhere in the passenger compartment and these antenna systems can either operate at one or a multiple of different frequencies to discriminate type, location and/or relative size of the object being investigated. This training can be accomplished using a neural network or modular neural network with the commercially available software. The system assesses the probability that the box 28 is a person, however, and if there is even the remotest chance that it is a person, the airbag deployment is not suppressed. The system is thus typically biased toward enabling airbag deployment.

In cases where different levels of airbag inflation are possible, and there are different levels of injury associated with an out of position occupant being subjected to varying levels of airbag deployment, it is sometimes possible to permit a depowered or low level airbag deployment in cases of uncertainty. If, for example, the neural network has a problem distinguishing whether a box or a forward facing child seat is present on the vehicle seat, the decision can be made to deploy the airbag in a depowered or low level deployment state. Other situations where such a decision could be made would be when there is confusion as to whether a forward facing human is in position or out-of-position.

Neural networks systems frequently have problems in accurately discriminating the exact location of an occupant especially when different-sized occupants are considered. This results in a gray zone around the border of the keep out zone where the system provides a weak fire or weak no fire decision. For those cases, deployment of the airbag in a depowered state can resolve the situation since an occupant in a gray zone around the keep out zone boundary would be unlikely to be injured by such a depowered deployment while significant airbag protection is still being supplied.

Electromagnetic or ultrasonic energy can be transmitted in three modes in determining the position of an occupant, for example. In most of the cases disclosed above, it is assumed that the energy will be transmitted in a broad diverging beam which interacts with a substantial portion of the occupant or other object to be monitored. This method can have the disadvantage that it will reflect first off the nearest object and, especially if that object is close to the transmitter, it may mask the true position of the occupant or object. It can also reflect off many parts of the object where the reflections can be separated in time and processed as in an ultrasonic occupant sensing system. This can also be partially overcome through the use of the second mode which uses a narrow beam. In this case, several narrow beams are used. These beams are aimed in different directions toward the occupant from a position sufficiently away from the occupant or object such that interference is unlikely.

A single receptor could be used provided the beams are either cycled on at different times or are of different frequencies. Another approach is to use a single beam emanating from a location which has an unimpeded view of the occupant or object such as the windshield header in the case of an automobile or near the roof at one end of a trailer or shipping container, for example. If two spaced apart CCD array receivers are used, the angle of the reflected beam can be determined and the location of the occupant can be calculated. The third mode is to use a single beam in a manner so that it scans back and forth and/or up and down, or in some other pattern, across the occupant, object or the space in general. In this manner, an image of the occupant or object can be obtained using a single receptor and pattern recognition software can be used to locate the head or chest of the occupant or size of the object, for example. The beam approach is most applicable to electromagnetic energy but high frequency ultrasound can also be formed into a narrow beam.

A similar effect to modifying the wave transmission mode can also be obtained by varying the characteristics of the receptors. Through appropriate lenses or reflectors, receptors can be made to be most sensitive to radiation emitted from a particular direction. In this manner, a single broad beam transmitter can be used coupled with an array of focused receivers, or a scanning receiver, to obtain a rough image of the occupant or occupying object.

Each of these methods of transmission or reception could be used, for example, at any of the preferred mounting locations shown in FIG. 5.

As shown in FIG. 7, there are provided four sets of wave-receiving sensor systems 6, 8, 9, 10 mounted within the passenger compartment of an automotive vehicle. Each set of sensor systems 6, 8, 9, 10 comprises a transmitter and a receiver (or just a receiver in some cases), which may be integrated into a single unit or individual components separated from one another. In this embodiment, the sensor system 6 is mounted on the A-Pillar of the vehicle. The sensor system 9 is mounted on the upper portion of the B-Pillar. The sensor system 8 is mounted on the roof ceiling portion or the headliner. The sensor system 10 is mounted near the middle of an instrument panel 17 in front of the driver's seat 3.

The sensor systems 6, 8, 9, 10 are preferably ultrasonic or electromagnetic, although sensor systems 6, 8, 9, 10 can be any other type of sensors which will detect the presence of an occupant from a distance including capacitive or electric field sensors. Also, if the sensor systems 6, 8, 9, 10 are passive infrared sensors, for example, then they may only comprise a wave-receiver. Recent advances in Quantum Well Infrared Photodetectors by NASA show great promise for this application. See “Many Applications Possible For Largest Quantum Infrared Detector”, Goddard Space Center News Release Feb. 27, 2002.

The Quantum Well Infrared Photodetector is a new detector which promises to be a low-cost alternative to conventional infrared detector technology for a wide range of scientific and commercial applications, and particularly for sensing inside and outside of a vehicle. The main problem that needs to be solved is that it operates at 76 degrees Kelvin (−323 degrees F.). Chips are being developed capable of cooling other chips economically. It remains to be seen if these low temperatures can be economically achieved.

A section of the passenger compartment of an automobile is shown generally as 40 in FIGS. 8A-8D. A driver 30 of the vehicle sits on a seat 3 behind a steering wheel 42, which contains an airbag assembly 44. Airbag assembly 44 may be integrated into the steering wheel assembly or coupled to the steering wheel 42. Five transmitter and/or receiver assemblies 49, 50, 51, 52 and 54 are positioned at various places in the passenger compartment to determine the location of various parts of the driver, e.g., the head, chest and torso, relative to the airbag and to otherwise monitor the interior of the passenger compartment. Monitoring of the interior of the passenger compartment can entail detecting the presence or absence of the driver and passengers, differentiating between animate and inanimate objects, detecting the presence of occupied or unoccupied child seats, rear-facing or forward-facing, and identifying and ascertaining the identity of the occupying items in the passenger compartment. a similar system can be used for monitoring the interior of a truck, shipping container or other containers.

A processor such as control circuitry 20 is connected to the transmitter/receiver assemblies 49, 50, 51, 52, 54 and controls the transmission from the transmitters, if a transmission component is present in the assemblies, and captures the return signals from the receivers, if a receiver component is present in the assemblies. Control circuitry 20 usually contains analog to digital converters (ADCs) or a frame grabber or equivalent, a microprocessor containing sufficient memory and appropriate software including, for example, pattern recognition algorithms, and other appropriate drivers, signal conditioners, signal generators, etc. Usually, in any given implementation, only three or four of the transmitter/receiver assemblies would be used depending on their mounting locations as described below. In some special cases, such as for a simple classification system, only a single or sometimes only two transmitter/receiver assemblies are used.

A portion of the connection between the transmitter/receiver assemblies 49, 50, 51, 52, 54 and the control circuitry 20, is shown as wires. These connections can be wires, either individual wires leading from the control circuitry 20 to each of the transmitter/receiver assemblies 49, 50, 51, 52, 54 or one or more wire buses or in some cases, wireless data transmission can be used.

The location of the control circuitry 20 in the dashboard of the vehicle is for illustration purposes only and does not limit the location of the control circuitry 20. Rather, the control circuitry 20 may be located anywhere convenient or desired in the vehicle.

It is contemplated that a system and method in accordance with the invention can include a single transmitter and multiple receivers, each at a different location. Thus, each receiver would not be associated with a transmitter forming transmitter/receiver assemblies. Rather, for example, with reference to FIG. 8A, only element 51 could constitute a transmitter/receiver assembly and elements 49, 50, 52 and 54 could be receivers only.

On the other hand, it is conceivable that in some implementations, a system and method in accordance with the invention include a single receiver and multiple transmitters. Thus, each transmitter would not be associated with a receiver forming transmitter/receiver assemblies. Rather, for example, with reference to FIG. 8A, only element 51 would constitute a transmitter/receiver assembly and elements 49, 50, 52, 54 would be transmitters only.

One ultrasonic transmitter/receiver as used herein is similar to that used on modern auto-focus cameras such as manufactured by the Polaroid Corporation. Other camera auto-focusing systems use different technologies, which are also applicable here, to achieve the same distance to object determination. One camera system manufactured by Fuji of Japan, for example, uses a stereoscopic system which could also be used to determine the position of a vehicle occupant providing there is sufficient light available. In the case of insufficient light, a source of infrared light can be added to illuminate the driver. In a related implementation, a source of infrared light is reflected off of the windshield and illuminates the vehicle occupant. An infrared receiver 56 is located attached to the rear view mirror assembly 55, as shown in FIG. 8E. Alternately, the infrared can be sent by the device 50 and received by a receiver elsewhere. Since any of the devices shown in these figures could be either transmitters or receivers or both, for simplicity, only the transmitted and not the reflected wave fronts are frequently illustrated.

When using the surface of the windshield as a reflector of infrared radiation (for transmitter/receiver assembly and element 52), care must be taken to assure that the desired reflectivity at the frequency of interest is achieved. Mirror materials, such as metals and other special materials manufactured by Eastman Kodak, have a reflectivity for infrared frequencies that is substantially higher than at visible frequencies. They are thus candidates for coatings to be placed on the windshield surfaces for this purpose.

There are two preferred methods of implementing the vehicle interior monitoring system of at least one of the inventions disclosed herein, a microprocessor system and an application specific integrated circuit system (ASIC). Both of these systems are represented schematically as 20 herein. In some systems, both a microprocessor and an ASIC are used. In other systems, most if not all of the circuitry is combined onto a single chip (system on a chip). The particular implementation depends on the quantity to be made and economic considerations.

The position of the occupant may be determined in various ways including by receiving and analyzing waves from a space in a passenger compartment of the vehicle occupied by the occupant, transmitting waves to impact the occupant, receiving waves after impact with the occupant and measuring time between transmission and reception of the waves, obtaining two or three-dimensional images of a passenger compartment of the vehicle occupied by the occupant and analyzing the images with an optional focusing of the images prior to analysis, or by moving a beam of radiation through a passenger compartment of the vehicle occupied by the occupant. The waves may be ultrasonic, radar, electromagnetic, passive infrared, and the like, and capacitive in nature. In the latter case, a capacitance or capacitive sensor may be provided. An electric field sensor could also be used.

Deployment of the airbag can be disabled when the determined position is too close to the airbag.

The rate at which the airbag is inflated and/or the time in which the airbag is inflated may be determined based on the determined position of the occupant.

A system for controlling deployment of an airbag comprises a determining system for determining the position of an occupant to be protected by deployment of the airbag, a sensor system for assessing the probability that a crash requiring deployment of the airbag is occurring, and a circuit coupled to the determining system, the sensor system and the airbag for enabling deployment of the airbag in consideration of the determined position of the occupant and the assessed probability that a crash is occurring. The circuit is structured and arranged to analyze the assessed probability relative to a pre-determined threshold whereby deployment of the airbag is enabled only when the assessed probability is greater than the threshold. Further, the circuit are arranged to adjust the threshold based on the determined position of the occupant. The determining system may any of the determining systems discussed above.

One method for controlling deployment of an airbag comprises a crash sensor for providing information on a crash involving the vehicle, a position determining arrangement for determining the position of an occupant to be protected by deployment of the airbag and a circuit coupled to the airbag, the crash sensor and the position determining arrangement and arranged to issue a deployment signal to the airbag to cause deployment of the airbag. The circuit is arranged to consider a deployment threshold which varies based on the determined position of the occupant. Further, the circuit is arranged to assess the probability that a crash requiring deployment of the airbag is occurring and analyze the assessed probability relative to the threshold whereby deployment of the airbag is enabled only when the assessed probability is greater than the threshold.

In another implementation, the sensor algorithm may determine the rate that gas is generated to affect the rate at which the airbag is inflated. In all of these cases the position of the occupant is used to affect the deployment of the airbag either as to whether or not it should be deployed at all, the time of deployment or as to the rate of inflation.

1.1 Ultrasonics

1.1.1 General

The maximum acoustic frequency that is practical to use for acoustic imaging in the systems is about 40 to 160 kilohertz (kHz). The wavelength of a 50 kHz acoustic wave is about 0.6 cm which is too coarse to determine the fine features of a person's face, for example. It is well understood by those skilled in the art that features which are much smaller than the wavelength of the irradiating radiation cannot be distinguished. Similarly, the wavelength of common radar systems varies from about 0.9 cm (for 33 GHz K band) to 133 cm (for 225 MHz P band) which are also too coarse for person-identification systems.

Referring now to FIG. 5, a section of the passenger compartment of an automobile is shown generally as 40 in FIG. 5. A driver of a vehicle 30 sits on a seat 3 behind a steering wheel 42 which contains an airbag assembly 44. Four transmitter and/or receiver assemblies 50, 52, 53 and 54 are positioned at various places in or around the passenger compartment to determine the location of the head, chest and torso of the driver 30 relative to the airbag assembly 44. Usually, in any given implementation, only one or two of the transmitters and receivers would be used depending on their mounting locations as described below.

FIG. 5 illustrates several of the possible locations of such devices. For example, transmitter and receiver 50 emits ultrasonic acoustical waves which bounce off the chest of the driver 30 and return. Periodically, a burst of ultrasonic waves at about 50 kilohertz is emitted by the transmitter/receiver and then the echo, or reflected signal, is detected by the same or different device. An associated electronic circuit measures the time between the transmission and the reception of the ultrasonic waves and determines the distance from the transmitter/receiver to the driver 30 based on the velocity of sound. This information can then be sent to a microprocessor that can be located in the crash sensor and diagnostic circuitry which determines if the driver 30 is close enough to the airbag assembly 44 that a deployment might, by itself, cause injury to the driver 30. In such a case, the circuit disables the airbag system and thereby prevents its deployment. In an alternate case, the sensor algorithm assesses the probability that a crash requiring an airbag is in process and waits until that probability exceeds an amount that is dependent on the position of the driver 30. Thus, for example, the sensor might decide to deploy the airbag based on a need probability assessment of 50%, if the decision must be made immediately for a driver 30 approaching the airbag, but might wait until the probability rises to 95% for a more distant driver. Although a driver system has been illustrated, the passenger system would be similar.

Alternate mountings for the transmitter/receiver include various locations on the instrument panel on either side of the steering column such as 53 in FIG. 5. Also, although some of the devices herein illustrated assume that for the ultrasonic system, the same device is used for both transmitting and receiving waves, there are advantages in separating these functions, at least for standard transducer systems. Since there is a time lag required for the system to stabilize after transmitting a pulse before it can receive a pulse, close measurements are enhanced, for example, by using separate transmitters and receivers. In addition, if the ultrasonic transmitter and receiver are separated, the transmitter can transmit continuously, provided the transmitted signal is modulated such that the received signal can be compared with the transmitted signal to determine the time it takes for the waves to reach and reflect off of the occupant.

Many methods exist for this modulation including varying the frequency or amplitude of the waves or pulse modulation or coding. In all cases, the logic circuit which controls the sensor and receiver must be able to determine when the signal which was most recently received was transmitted. In this manner, even though the time that it takes for the signal to travel from the transmitter to the receiver, via reflection off of the occupant or other object to be monitored, may be several milliseconds, information as to the position of the occupant is received continuously which permits an accurate, although delayed, determination of the occupant's velocity from successive position measurements. Other modulation methods that may be applied to electromagnetic radiations include TDMA, CDMA, noise or pseudo-noise, spatial, etc.

Conventional ultrasonic distance measuring devices must wait for the signal to travel to the occupant or other monitored object and return before a new signal is sent. This greatly limits the frequency at which position data can be obtained to the formula where the frequency is equal to the velocity of sound divided by two times the distance to the occupant. For example, if the velocity of sound is taken at about 1000 feet per second, occupant position data for an occupant or object located one foot from the transmitter can only be obtained every 2 milliseconds which corresponds to a frequency of about 500 Hz. At a three-foot displacement and allowing for some processing time, the frequency is closer to about 100 Hz.

This slow frequency that data can be collected seriously degrades the accuracy of the velocity calculation. The reflection of ultrasonic waves from the clothes of an occupant or the existence of thermal gradients, for example, can cause noise or scatter in the position measurement and lead to significant inaccuracies in a given measurement. When many measurements are taken more rapidly, as in the technique described here, these inaccuracies can be averaged and a significant improvement in the accuracy of the velocity calculation results.

The determination of the velocity of the occupant need not be derived from successive distance measurements. A potentially more accurate method is to make use of the Doppler Effect where the frequency of the reflected waves differs from the transmitted waves by an amount which is proportional to the occupant's velocity. In one embodiment, a single ultrasonic transmitter and a separate receiver are used to measure the position of the occupant, by the travel time of a known signal, and the velocity, by the frequency shift of that signal. Although the Doppler Effect has been used to determine whether an occupant has fallen asleep, it has not previously been used in conjunction with a position measuring device to determine whether an occupant is likely to become out of position, i.e., an extrapolated position in the future based on the occupant's current position and velocity as determined from successive position measurements, and thus in danger of being injured by a deploying airbag, or that a monitored object is moving. This combination is particularly advantageous since both measurements can be accurately and efficiently determined using a single transmitter and receiver pair resulting in a low cost system.

One problem with Doppler measurements is the slight change in frequency that occurs during normal occupant velocities. This requires that sophisticated electronic techniques and a low Q receiver should be utilized to increase the frequency and thereby render it easier to measure the velocity using the phase shift. For many implementations, therefore, the velocity of the occupant is determined by calculating the difference between successive position measurements.

The following discussion will apply to the case where ultrasonic sensors are used although a similar discussion can be presented relative to the use of electromagnetic sensors such as active infrared sensors, taking into account the differences in the technologies. Also, the following discussion will relate to an embodiment wherein the seat is the front passenger seat, although a similar discussion can apply to other vehicles and monitoring situations.

The ultrasonic or electromagnetic sensor systems, 6, 8, 9 and 10 in FIG. 7 can be controlled or driven, one at a time or simultaneously, by an appropriate driver circuit such as ultrasonic or electromagnetic sensor driver circuit 58 shown in FIG. 9. The transmitters of the ultrasonic or electromagnetic sensor systems 6, 8, 9 and 10 transmit respective ultrasonic or electromagnetic waves toward the seat 4 and transmit pulses (see FIG. 10( c)) in sequence at times t1, t2, t3 and t4 (t4>t3>t2>t1) or simultaneously (t1=t2=t3=t4). The reflected waves of the ultrasonic or electromagnetic waves are received by the receivers ChA-ChD of the ultrasonic or electromagnetic sensors 6, 8, 9 and 10. The receiver ChA is associated with the ultrasonic or electromagnetic sensor system 8, the receiver ChB is associated with the ultrasonic or electromagnetic sensor system 5, the receiver ChD is associated with the ultrasonic or electromagnetic sensor system 6, and the receiver ChD is associated with the ultrasonic or electromagnetic sensor system 9.

FIGS. 10( a) and 10(b) show examples of the reflected ultrasonic waves USRW that are received by receivers ChA-ChD. FIG. 10( a) shows an example of the reflected wave USRW that is obtained when an adult sits in a normally seated space on the passenger seat 4, while FIG. 10( b) shows an example of the reflected wave USRW that are obtained when an adult sits in a slouching state (one of the abnormal seated-states) in the passenger seat 4.

In the case of a normally seated passenger, as shown in FIGS. 6 and 7, the location of the ultrasonic sensor system 6 is closest to the passenger A. Therefore, the reflected wave pulse P1 is received earliest after transmission by the receiver ChD as shown in FIG. 10( a), and the width of the reflected wave pulse P1 is larger. Next, the distance from the ultrasonic sensor 8 is closer to the passenger A, so a reflected wave pulse P2 is received earlier by the receiver ChA compared with the remaining reflected wave pulses P3 and P4. Since the reflected wave pauses P3 and P4 take more time than the reflected wave pulses P1 and P2 to arrive at the receivers ChC and ChB, the reflected wave pulses P3 and P4 are received as the timings shown in FIG. 10( a). More specifically, since it is believed that the distance from the ultrasonic sensor system 6 to the passenger A is slightly shorter than the distance from the ultrasonic sensor system 10 to the passenger A, the reflected wave pulse P3 is received slightly earlier by the receiver ChC than the reflected wave pulse P4 is received by the receiver ChB.

In the case where the passenger A is sitting in a slouching state in the passenger seat 4, the distance between the ultrasonic sensor system 6 and the passenger A is shortest. Therefore, the time from transmission at time t3 to reception is shortest, and the reflected wave pulse P3 is received by the receiver ChC, as shown in FIG. 10( b). Next, the distances between the ultrasonic sensor system 10 and the passenger A becomes shorter, so the reflected wave pulse P4 is received earlier by the receiver ChB than the remaining reflected wave pulses P2 and P1. When the distance from the ultrasonic sensor system 8 to the passenger A is compared with that from the ultrasonic sensor system 9 to the passenger A, the distance from the ultrasonic sensor system 8 to the passenger A becomes shorter, so the reflected wave pulse P2 is received by the receiver ChA first and the reflected wave pulse P1 is thus received last by the receiver ChD.

The configurations of the reflected wave pulses P1-P4, the times that the reflected wave pulses P1-P4 are received, the sizes of the reflected wave pulses P1-P4 are varied depending upon the configuration and position of an object such as a passenger situated on the front passenger seat 4. FIGS. 10( a) and (b) merely show examples for the purpose of description and therefore the present invention is not limited to these examples.

The outputs of the receivers ChA-ChD, as shown in FIG. 9, are input to a band pass filter 60 through a multiplex circuit 59 which is switched in synchronization with a timing signal from the ultrasonic sensor drive circuit 58. The band pass filter 60 removes a low frequency wave component from the output signal based on each of the reflected wave USRW and also removes some of the noise. The output signal based on each of the reflected wave USRW is passed through the band pass filter 60, then is amplified by an amplifier 61. The amplifier 61 also removes the high frequency carrier wave component in each of the reflected waves USRW and generates an envelope wave signal. This envelope wave signal is input to an analog/digital converter (ADC) 62 and digitized as measured data. The measured data is input to a processing circuit 63, which is controlled by the timing signal which is in turn output from the ultrasonic sensor drive circuit 58.

The processing circuit 63 collects measured data at intervals of 7 ms (or at another time interval with the time interval also being referred to as a time window or time period), and 47 data points are generated for each of the ultrasonic sensor systems 6, 8, 9 and 10. For each of these reflected waves USRW, the initial reflected wave portion T1 and the last reflected wave portion T2 are cut off or removed in each time window. The reason for this will be described when the training procedure of a neural network is described later, and the description is omitted for now. With this, 32, 31, 37 and 38 data points will be sampled by the ultrasonic sensor systems 6, 8, 9 and 10, respectively. The reason why the number of data points differs for each of the ultrasonic sensor systems 6, 8, 9 and 10 is that the distance from the passenger seat 4 to the ultrasonic sensor systems 6, 8, 9 and 10 differ from one another.

Each of the measured data is input to a normalization circuit 64 and normalized. The normalized measured data is input to the neural network 65 as wave data.

A comprehensive occupant sensing system will now be discussed which involves a variety of different sensors, again this is for illustration purposes only and a similar description can be constructed for other vehicles including shipping container and truck trailer monitoring. Many of these sensors will be discussed under the appropriate sections below. FIG. 6 shows a passenger seat 70 to which an adjustment apparatus including a seated-state detecting unit according to the present invention may be applied. The seat 70 includes a horizontally situated bottom seat portion 4 and a vertically oriented back portion 72. The seat portion 4 is provided with one or more pressure or weight sensors 7, 76 that determine the weight of the object occupying the seat or the pressure applied by the object to the seat. The coupled portion between the seated portion 4 and the back portion 72 is provided with a reclining angle detecting sensor 57, which detects the tilted angle of the back portion 72 relative to the seat portion 4. The seat portion 4 is provided with a seat track position-detecting sensor 74. The seat track position detecting sensor 74 detects the quantity of movement of the seat portion 4 which is moved from a back reference position, indicated by the dotted chain line. Optionally embedded within the back portion 72 are a heartbeat sensor 71 and a motion sensor 73. Attached to the headliner is a capacitance sensor 78. The seat 70 may be the driver seat, the front passenger seat or any other seat in a motor vehicle as well as other seats in transportation vehicles or seats in non-transportation applications.

A pressure or weight measuring system such as the sensors 7 and 76 are associated with the seat, e.g., mounted into or below the seat portion 4 or on the seat structure, for measuring the pressure or weight applied onto the seat. The pressure or weight may be zero if no occupying item is present and the sensors are calibrated to only measure incremental weight or pressure. Sensors 7 and 76 may represent a plurality of different sensors which measure the pressure or weight applied onto the seat at different portions thereof or for redundancy purposes, e.g., such as by means of an airbag or fluid filled bladder 75 in the seat portion 4. Airbag or bladder 75 may contain a single or a plurality of chambers, each of which may be associated with a sensor (transducer) 76 for measuring the pressure in the chamber. Such sensors may be in the form of strain, force or pressure sensors which measure the force or pressure on the seat portion 4 or seat back 72, a part of the seat portion 4 or seat back 72, displacement measuring sensors which measure the displacement of the seat surface or the entire seat 70 such as through the use of strain gages mounted on the seat structural members, such as 7, or other appropriate locations, or systems which convert displacement into a pressure wherein one or more pressure sensors can be used as a measure of weight and/or weight distribution. Sensors 7, 76 may be of the types disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,242,701 and below. Although pressure or weight here is disclosed and illustrated with regard to measuring the pressure applied by or weight of an object occupying a seat in an automobile or truck, the same principles can be used to measure the pressure applied by and weight of objects occupying other vehicles including truck trailers and shipping containers. For example, a series of fluid filled bladders under a segmented floor could be used to measure the weight and weight distribution in a truck trailer.

Many practical problems have arisen during the development stages of bladder and strain gage based weight systems. Some of these problems relate to bladder sensors and in particular to gas-filled bladder sensors and are effectively dealt with in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,918,696, 5,927,427, 5,957,491, 5,979,585, 5,984,349, 6,021,863, 6,056,079, 6,076,853, 6,260,879 and 6,286,861. Other problems relate to seatbelt usage and to unanticipated stresses and strains that occur in seat mounting structures and will be discussed below.

As illustrated in FIG. 9, the output of the pressure or weight sensor(s) 7 and 76 is amplified by an amplifier 66 coupled to the pressure or weight sensor(s) 7, 76 and the amplified output is input to the analog/digital converter 67.

A heartbeat sensor 71 is arranged to detect a heartbeat, and the magnitude thereof, of a human occupant of the seat, if such a human occupant is present. The output of the heartbeat sensor 71 is input to the neural network 65. The heartbeat sensor 71 may be of the type as disclosed in McEwan (U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,573,012 and 5,766,208). The heartbeat sensor 71 can be positioned at any convenient position relative to the seat 4 where occupancy is being monitored. A preferred location is within the vehicle seatback. The heartbeat of a stowaway in a cargo container or truck trailer can similarly be measured be a sensor on the vehicle floor or other appropriate location that measures vibrations.

The reclining angle detecting sensor 57 and the seat track position-detecting sensor 74, which each may comprise a variable resistor, can be connected to constant-current circuits, respectively. A constant-current is supplied from the constant-current circuit to the reclining angle detecting sensor 57, and the reclining angle detecting sensor 57 converts a change in the resistance value on the tilt of the back portion 72 to a specific voltage. This output voltage is input to an analog/digital converter 68 as angle data, i.e., representative of the angle between the back portion 72 and the seat portion 4. Similarly, a constant current can be supplied from the constant-current circuit to the seat track position-detecting sensor 74 and the seat track position detecting sensor 74 converts a change in the resistance value based on the track position of the seat portion 4 to a specific voltage. This output voltage is input to an analog/digital converter 69 as seat track data. Thus, the outputs of the reclining angle-detecting sensor 57 and the seat track position-detecting sensor 74 are input to the analog/digital converters 68 and 69, respectively. Each digital data value from the ADCs 68, 69 is input to the neural network 65. Although the digitized data of the pressure or weight sensor(s) 7, 76 is input to the neural network 65, the output of the amplifier 66 is also input to a comparison circuit. The comparison circuit, which is incorporated in the gate circuit algorithm, determines whether or not the weight of an object on the passenger seat 70 is more than a predetermined weight, such as 60 lbs., for example. When the weight is more than 60 lbs., the comparison circuit outputs a logic 1 to the gate circuit to be described later. When the weight of the object is less than 60 lbs., a logic 0 is output to the gate circuit. A more detailed description of this and similar systems can be found in the numerous patents and patent applications assigned to the current assignee, Automotive Technologies International, Inc., and in the description below. The system described above is one example of many systems that can be designed using the teachings of at least one of the inventions disclosed herein for detecting the occupancy state of the seat of a vehicle.

As diagrammed in FIG. 11, the first step is to mount the four sets of ultrasonic sensor systems 11-14, the weight sensors 7, 76, the reclining angle detecting sensor 57, and the seat track position detecting sensor 74, for example, into a vehicle (step S1). For other vehicle monitoring tasks different sets of sensors could be used. Next, in order to provide data for the neural network 65 to learn the patterns of seated states, data is recorded for patterns of all possible seated or occupancy states and a list is maintained recording the seated or occupancy states for which data was acquired. The data from the sensors/transducers 6, 8, 9, 10, 57, 71, 73, 74, 76 and 78 for a particular occupancy of the passenger seat, for example, is called a vector (step S2). It should be pointed out that the use of the reclining angle detecting sensor 57, seat track position detecting sensor 74, heartbeat sensor 71, capacitive sensor 78 and motion sensor 73 is not essential to the detecting apparatus and method in accordance with the invention. However, each of these sensors, in combination with any one or more of the other sensors enhances the evaluation of the seated-state of the seat or the occupancy of the vehicle.

Next, based on the training data from the reflected waves of the ultrasonic sensor systems 6, 8, 9, 10 and the other sensors 7, 71, 73, 76, 78 the vector data is collected (step S3). Next, the reflected waves P1-P4 are modified by removing the initial reflected waves from each time window with a short reflection time from an object (range gating) and the last portion of the reflected waves from each time window with a long reflection time from an object (step S4). It is believed that the reflected waves with a short reflection time from an object is due to cross-talk, that is, waves from the transmitters which leak into each of their associated receivers ChA-ChD. It is also believed that the reflected waves with a long reflection time are reflected waves from an object far away from the passenger seat or from multipath reflections. If these two reflected wave portions are used as data, they will add noise to the training process. Therefore, these reflected wave portions are eliminated from the data.

Recent advances in ultrasonic transducer design have now permitted the use of a single transducer acting as both a sender (transmitter) and receiver. These same advances have substantially reduced the ringing of the transducer after the excitation pulse has been caused to die out to where targets as close as about 2 inches from the transducer can be sensed. Thus, the magnitude of the T1 time period has been substantially reduced.

The measured data is normalized by making the peaks of the reflected wave pulses P1-P4 equal (step S5). This eliminates the effects of different reflectivities of different objects and people depending on the characteristics of their surfaces such as their clothing. Data from the weight sensor, seat track position sensor and seat reclining angle sensor is also frequently normalized based typically on fixed normalization parameters. When other sensors are used for other types of monitoring, similar techniques are used.

The data from the ultrasonic transducers are now also preferably fed through a logarithmic compression circuit that substantially reduces the magnitude of reflected signals from high reflectivity targets compared to those of low reflectivity. Additionally, a time gain circuit is used to compensate for the difference in sonic strength received by the transducer based on the distance of the reflecting object from the transducer.

As various parts of the vehicle interior identification and monitoring system described in the above referenced patents and patent applications are implemented, a variety of transmitting and receiving transducers will be present in the vehicle passenger compartment. If several of these transducers are ultrasonic transmitters and receivers, they can be operated in a phased array manner, as described elsewhere for the headrest, to permit precise distance measurements and mapping of the components of the passenger compartment. This is illustrated in FIG. 13 which is a perspective view of the interior of the passenger compartment showing a variety of transmitters and receivers, 6, 8, 9, 23, 49-51 which can be used in a sort of phased array system. In addition, information can be transmitted between the transducers using coded signals in an ultrasonic network through the vehicular compartment airspace. If one of these sensors is an optical CCD or CMOS array, the location of the driver's eyes can be accurately determined and the results sent to the seat ultrasonically. Obviously, many other possibilities exist for automobile and other vehicle monitoring situations.

To use ultrasonic transducers in a phase array mode generally requires that the transducers have a low Q. Certain new micromachined capacitive transducers appear to be suitable for such an application. The range of such transducers is at present limited, however.

The speed of sound varies with temperature, humidity, and pressure. This can be compensated for by using the fact that the geometry between the transducers is known and the speed of sound can therefore be measured. Thus, on vehicle startup and as often as desired thereafter, the speed of sound can be measured by one transducer, such as transducer 18 in FIG. 14, sending a signal which is directly received by another transducer 5. Since the distance separating them is known, the speed of sound can be calculated and the system automatically adjusted to remove the variation due to variations in the speed of sound. Therefore, the system operates with same accuracy regardless of the temperature, humidity or atmospheric pressure. It may even be possible to use this technique to also automatically compensate for any effects due to wind velocity through an open window. An additional benefit of this system is that it can be used to determine the vehicle interior temperature for use by other control systems within the vehicle since the variation in the velocity of sound is a strong function of temperature and a weak function of pressure and humidity.

The problem with the speed of sound measurement described above is that some object in the vehicle may block the path from one transducer to the other. This of course could be checked and a correction would not be made if the signal from one transducer does not reach the other transducer. The problem, however, is that the path might not be completely blocked but only slightly blocked. This would cause the ultrasonic path length to increase, which would give a false indication of a temperature change. This can be solved by using more than one transducer. All of the transducers can broadcast signals to all of the other transducers. The problem here, of course, is which transducer pair should be believed if they all give different answers. The answer is the one that gives the shortest distance or the greatest calculated speed of sound. By this method, there are a total of 6 separate paths for four ultrasonic transducers.

An alternative method of determining the temperature is to use the transducer circuit to measure some parameter of the transducer that changes with temperature. For example, the natural frequency of ultrasonic transducers changes in a known manner with temperature and therefore by measuring the natural frequency of the transducer, the temperature can be determined. Since this method does not require communication between transducers, it would also work in situations where each transducer has a different resonant frequency.

The process, by which all of the distances are carefully measured from each transducer to the other transducers, and the algorithm developed to determine the speed of sound, is a novel part of the teachings of the instant invention for use with ultrasonic transducers. Prior to this, the speed of sound calculation was based on a single transmission from one transducer to a known second transducer. This resulted in an inaccurate system design and degraded the accuracy of systems in the field.

If the electronic control module that is part of the system is located in generally the same environment as the transducers, another method of determining the temperature is available. This method utilizes a device and whose temperature sensitivity is known and which is located in the same box as the electronic circuit. In fact, in many cases, an existing component on the printed circuit board can be monitored to give an indication of the temperature. For example, the diodes in a log comparison circuit have characteristics that their resistance changes in a known manner with temperature. It can be expected that the electronic module will generally be at a higher temperature than the surrounding environment, however, the temperature difference is a known and predictable amount. Thus, a reasonably good estimation of the temperature in the passenger compartment, or other container compartment, can also be obtained in this manner. Thermisters or other temperature transducers can be used.

The placement of ultrasonic transducers for the example of ultrasonic occupant position sensor system of at least one of the inventions disclosed herein include the following novel disclosures: (1) the application of two sensors to single-axis monitoring of target volumes; (2) the method of locating two sensors spanning a target volume to sense object positions, that is, transducers are mounted along the sensing axis beyond the objects to be sensed; (3) the method of orientation of the sensor axis for optimal target discrimination parallel to the axis of separation of distinguishing target features; and (4) the method of defining the head and shoulders and supporting surfaces as defining humans for rear facing child seat detection and forward facing human detection.

A similar set of observations is available for the use of electromagnetic, capacitive, electric field or other sensors and for other vehicle monitoring situations. Such rules however must take into account that some of such sensors typically are more accurate in measuring lateral and vertical dimensions relative to the sensor than distances perpendicular to the sensor. This is particularly the case for CMOS and CCD-based transducers.

Considerable work is ongoing to improve the resolution of the ultrasonic transducers. To take advantage of higher resolution transducers, data points should be obtained that are closer together in time. This means that after the envelope has been extracted from the returned signal, the sampling rate should be increased from approximately 1000 samples per second to perhaps 2000 samples per second or even higher. By doubling or tripling the amount of data required to be analyzed, the system which is mounted on the vehicle will require greater computational power. This results in a more expensive electronic system. Not all of the data is of equal importance, however. The position of the occupant in the normal seating position does not need to be known with great accuracy whereas, as that occupant is moving toward the keep out zone boundary during pre-crash braking, the spatial accuracy requirements become more important. Fortunately, the neural network algorithm generating system has the capability of indicating to the system designer the relative value of each data point used by the neural network. Thus, as many as, for example, 500 data points per vector may be collected and fed to the neural network during the training stage and, after careful pruning, the final number of data points to be used by the vehicle mounted system may be reduced to 150, for example. This technique of using the neural network algorithm-generating program to prune the input data is an important teaching of the present invention.

By this method, the advantages of higher resolution transducers can be optimally used without increasing the cost of the electronic vehicle-mounted circuits. Also, once the neural network has determined the spacing of the data points, this can be fine-tuned, for example, by acquiring more data points at the edge of the keep out zone as compared to positions well into the safe zone. The initial technique is done by collecting the full 500 data points, for example, while in the system installed in the vehicle the data digitization spacing can be determined by hardware or software so that only the required data is acquired.

1.1.2 Thermal Gradients

Techniques for compensating for thermal gradients which affect ultrasonic waves and electromagnetic waves are set forth in U.S. patent application Ser. Nos. 10/940,881 and 12/117,038.

1.2 Optics

In FIG. 4, the ultrasonic transducers of the previous designs are replaced by laser transducers 8 and 9 which are connected to a microprocessor 20. In all other manners, the system operates the same. The design of the electronic circuits for this laser system is described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,653,462 and in particular FIG. 8 thereof and the corresponding description. In this case, a pattern recognition system such as a neural network system is employed and uses the demodulated signals from the laser transducers 8 and 9.

A more complicated and sophisticated system is shown conceptually in FIG. 5 where transmitter/receiver assembly 52 is illustrated. In this case, as described briefly above, an infrared transmitter and a pair of optical receivers are used to capture the reflection of the passenger. When this system is used to monitor the driver as shown in FIG. 5, with appropriate circuitry and a microprocessor, the behavior of the driver can be monitored. Using this system, not only can the position and velocity of the driver be determined and used in conjunction with an airbag system, but it is also possible to determine whether the driver is falling asleep or exhibiting other potentially dangerous behavior by comparing portions of his/her image over time. In this case, the speed of the vehicle can be reduced or the vehicle even stopped if this action is considered appropriate. This implementation has the highest probability of an unimpeded view of the driver since he/she must have a clear view through the windshield in order to operate the motor vehicle.

The output of microprocessor 20 of the monitoring system is shown connected schematically to a general interface 36 which can be the vehicle ignition enabling system; the entertainment system; the seat, mirror, suspension or other adjustment systems; telematics or any other appropriate vehicle system.

FIG. 8A illustrates a typical wave pattern of transmitted infrared waves from transmitter/receiver assembly 49, which is mounted on the side of the vehicle passenger compartment above the front, driver's side door. Transmitter/receiver assembly 51, shown overlaid onto transmitter/receiver 49, is actually mounted in the center headliner of the passenger compartment (and thus between the driver's seat and the front passenger seat), near the dome light, and is aimed toward the driver. Typically, there will be a symmetrical installation for the passenger side of the vehicle. That is, a transmitter/receiver assembly would be arranged above the front, passenger side door and another transmitter/receiver assembly would be arranged in the center headliner, near the dome light, and aimed toward the front, passenger side door. Additional transducers can be mounted in similar places for monitoring both rear seat positions, another can be used for monitoring the trunk or any other interior volumes. As with the ultrasonic installations, most of the examples below are for automobile applications since these are generally the most complicated. Nevertheless, at least one of the inventions disclosed herein is not limited to automobile vehicles and similar but generally simpler designs apply to other vehicles such as shipping containers, railroad cars and truck trailers.

In a preferred embodiment, each transmitter/receiver assembly 49, 51 comprises an optical transducer, which may be a camera and an LED, that will frequently be used in conjunction with other optical transmitter/receiver assemblies such as shown at 50, 52 and 54, which act in a similar manner. In some cases, especially when a low cost system is used primarily to categorize the seat occupancy, a single or dual camera installation is used. In many cases, the source of illumination is not co-located with the camera. For example, in one preferred implementation, two cameras such as 49 and 51 are used with a single illumination source located at 49.

These optical transmitter/receiver assemblies frequently comprise an optical transmitter, which may be an infrared LED (or possibly a near infrared (NIR) LED), a laser with a diverging lens or a scanning laser assembly, and a receiver such as a CCD or CMOS array and particularly an active pixel CMOS camera or array or a HDRL or HDRC camera or array as discussed below. The transducer assemblies map the location of the occupant(s), objects and features thereof, in a two or three-dimensional image as will now be described.

Optical transducers using CCD arrays are now becoming price competitive and, as mentioned above, will soon be the technology of choice for interior vehicle monitoring. A single CCD array of 160 by 160 pixels, for example, coupled with the appropriate trained pattern recognition software, can be used to form an image of the head of an occupant and accurately locate the head, eyes, ears etc. for some of the purposes of at least one of the inventions disclosed herein.

In one embodiment, the microprocessor 20 includes one or more a trained pattern recognition algorithms which have been trained using data about known locations of the head and facial features of occupants in different positions and images from CCD arrays of, or more generally waves received by wave-receiving transducers from, the passenger compartment when the occupants in the different positions are present. For example, during training, occupants are placed in the seat and waves are received to create a data set, with the location of the head relative to the passenger compartment being provided to the pattern recognition algorithm generating software. The occupant moves and waves are again received to create another data set. This process continues for that occupant and then for different occupants. The data sets are input to the pattern recognition algorithm generating software to provide a pattern recognition algorithm which can operatively receive as input waves or signals representative thereof and provide the location of the head relative to the passenger compartment as output, and infer the location of the eyes relative to the passenger compartment from the location of the head.

The location or position of the occupant can be determined in various ways as noted and listed above and below as well. Generally, any type of occupant sensor can be used. Some particular occupant sensors which can be used in the systems and methods in accordance with the invention. Specifically, a camera or other device for obtaining images of a passenger compartment of the vehicle occupied by the occupant and analyzing the images can be mounted at the locations of the transmitter and/or receiver assemblies 49, 50, 51, and 54 in FIG. 8C. The camera or other device may be constructed to obtain three-dimensional images and/or focus the images on one or more optical arrays such as CCDs. Further, a mechanism for moving a beam of radiation through a passenger compartment of the vehicle occupied by the occupant, i.e., a scanning system, can be used. When using ultrasonic or electromagnetic waves, the time of flight between the transmission and reception of the waves can be used to determine the position of the occupant, i.e., the distances between the transmitter and/or receiver assemblies and the occupant providing a reflected beam can be analyzed in combination to provide the position of the occupant. The time of flight between the transmission and reception of the beams may also be used to determine one or more other or alternative characteristics of the occupant, including, for example, the absence or presence of an occupant and the type of the occupant. In the former case, when an occupant is not present, parts of the vehicle would be providing the reflected beam and knowledge of the distance between each transmitter and/or receiver assembly and the part of the vehicle in the path of its emitting beam could be predetermined so that whenever the time of flight of the beam corresponds to this distance, it may be assumed that there is no object in the path of the beam from that transmitter and/or receiver assembly. In the latter case, the type of occupant may be a determination whether the occupant is a human occupant or possibly an inanimate object such as bag of groceries. This determination would be useful in the control of an occupant protection or restraint device by the microprocessor 20 whereby such a device would be actuated only when a human occupant would be detected (subject to possibly other deployment conditions) and not, for example, when a bag of groceries is detected.

In one embodiment, when a determination of the time-of-flight of beams is used to determine one or more characteristics of the occupant, or other object in the compartment of the vehicle, e.g., when present on the seat therein, it is important that the transmitter and/or receiver assemblies are positioned at different locations to provide different beam paths. That is, the beams are emitted in different direction into the area above the seat in which the occupant may be situated. The locations of the transmitter and/or receiver assemblies and directions in which the beams are emitted therefrom may be selected to optimize the passage of beams through the area above the seat or to ensure that at least one beam will interact with an occupant regardless of the position and/or type of occupant.

The occupant sensor can also be arranged to receive infrared radiation from a space in a passenger compartment of the vehicle occupied by the occupant. It can also comprise an electric field sensor operative in a seat occupied by the occupant or a capacitance sensor operative in a seat occupied by the occupant. The implementation of such sensors in the invention will be readily appreciated by one skilled in the art in view of the disclosure herein of general occupant sensors for sensing the position of the occupant using waves, energy or radiation.

To summarize, although ultrasonic neural network systems are operating with high accuracy, they do not totally eliminate the problem of deaths and injuries caused by airbag deployments. Optical systems, on the other hand, at little or no increase in cost, have the capability of virtually 100 percent accuracy. Additional problems of ultrasonic systems arise from the slow speed of sound and diffraction caused by variations is air density. The slow sound speed limits the rate at which data can be collected and thus eliminates the possibility of tracking the motion of an occupant during a high speed crash.

In an embodiment wherein electromagnetic energy is used, it is to be appreciated that any portion of the electromagnetic signals that impinges upon a body portion of the occupant is at least partially absorbed by the body portion. Sometimes, this is due to the fact that the human body is composed primarily of water, and that electromagnetic energy at certain frequencies can be readily absorbed by water. The amount of electromagnetic signal absorption is related to the frequency of the signal, and size or bulk of the body portion that the signal impinges upon. For example, a torso of a human body tends to absorb a greater percentage of electromagnetic energy as compared to a hand of a human body for some frequencies.

Thus, when electromagnetic waves or energy signals are transmitted by a transmitter, the returning waves received by a receiver provide an indication of the absorption of the electromagnetic energy. That is, absorption of electromagnetic energy will vary depending on the presence or absence of a human occupant, the occupant's size, bulk, etc., so that different signals will be received relating to the degree or extent of absorption by the occupying item on a seat or elsewhere in the vehicle. The receiver will produce a signal representative of the returned waves or energy signals which will thus constitute an absorption signal as it corresponds to the absorption of electromagnetic energy by the occupying item in the seat.

Another optical infrared transmitter and receiver assembly is shown generally at 52 in FIG. 5 and is mounted onto the instrument panel facing the windshield. Although not shown in this view, reference 52 consists of three devices, one transmitter and two receivers, one on each side of the transmitter. In this case, the windshield is used to reflect the illumination light, and also the light reflected back by the driver, in a manner similar to the “heads-up” display which is now being offered on several automobile models. The “heads-up” display, of course, is currently used only to display information to the driver and is not used to reflect light from the driver to a receiver. In this case, the distance to the driver is determined stereoscopically through the use of the two receivers. In its most elementary sense, this system can be used to measure the distance between the driver and the airbag module. In more sophisticated applications, the position of the driver, and particularly of the driver's head, can be monitored over time and any behavior, such as a drooping head, indicative of the driver falling asleep or of being incapacitated by drugs, alcohol or illness can be detected and appropriate action taken. Other forms of radiation including visual light, radar, terahertz and microwaves as well as high frequency ultrasound could also be used by those skilled in the art.

A passive infrared system could be used to determine the position of an occupant relative to an airbag or even to detect the presence of a human or other life form in a vehicle. Passive infrared measures the infrared radiation emitted by the occupant and compares it to the background. As such, unless it is coupled with an imager and a pattern recognition system, it can best be used to determine that an occupant is moving toward the airbag since the amount of infrared radiation would then be increasing. Therefore, it could be used to estimate the velocity of the occupant but not his/her position relative to the airbag, since the absolute amount of such radiation will depend on the occupant's size, temperature and clothes as well as on his position. When passive infrared is used in conjunction with another distance measuring system, such as the ultrasonic system described above, the combination would be capable of determining both the position and velocity of the occupant relative to the airbag. Such a combination would be economical since only the simplest circuits would be required. In one implementation, for example, a group of waves from an ultrasonic transmitter could be sent to an occupant and the reflected group received by a receiver. The distance to the occupant would be proportional to the time between the transmitted and received groups of waves and the velocity determined from the passive infrared system. This system could be used in any of the locations illustrated in FIG. 5 as well as others not illustrated including truck trailers and cargo containers.

Recent advances in Quantum Well Infrared Photodetectors (QWIP) are particularly applicable here due to the range of frequencies that they can be designed to sense (3-18 microns) which encompasses the radiation naturally emitted by the human body. Currently, QWIPs need to be cooled and thus are not quite ready for vehicle applications. There are, however, longer wave IR detectors based of focal plane arrays (FPA) that are available in low resolution now. As the advantages of SWIR, MWIR and LWIR become more evident, devices that image in this part of the electromagnetic spectrum will become more available.

Passive infrared could also be used effectively in conjunction with a pattern recognition system. In this case, the passive infrared radiation emitted from an occupant can be focused onto a QWIP or FPA or even a CCD array, in some cases, and analyzed with appropriate pattern recognition circuitry, or software, to determine the position of the occupant. Such a system could be mounted at any of the preferred mounting locations shown in FIG. 5 as well as others not illustrated.

Lastly, it is possible to use a modulated scanning beam of radiation and a single pixel receiver, PIN or avalanche diode, in the inventions described above. Any form of energy or radiation used above may also be in the infrared or radar spectrums and may be polarized and filters may be used in the receiver to block out sunlight etc. These filters may be notch filters and may be made integral with the lens as one or more coatings on the lens surface as is well known in the art. Note, in many applications, this may not be necessary as window glass blocks all IR except the near IR.

For some cases, such as a laser transceiver that may contain a CMOS array, CCD, PIN or avalanche diode or other light sensitive devices, a scanner is also required that can be either solid state as in the case of some radar systems based on a phased array, an acoustical optical system as is used by some laser systems, or a mirror or MEMS based reflecting scanner, or other appropriate technology. In one embodiment, controllable scanning using MEMS mirrors or other flexible or distortable mirrors is used.

As discussed above and below, other occupant sensing systems can also be provided that monitor the breathing or other motion of the driver, for example, including the driver's heartbeat, eye blink rate, gestures, direction or gaze and provide appropriate responses including the control of a vehicle component including any such components listed herein. If the driver is falling asleep, for example, a warning can be issued and eventually the vehicle directed off the road if necessary.

The combination of a camera system with a microphone and speaker allows for a wide variety of options for the control of vehicle components. A sophisticated algorithm can interpret a gesture, for example, that may be in response to a question from the computer system. The driver may indicate by a gesture that he or she wants the temperature to change and the system can then interpret a “thumbs up” gesture for higher temperature and a “thumbs down” gesture for a lower temperature. When it is correct, the driver can signal by gesture that it is fine. A very large number of component control options exist that can be entirely executed by the combination of voice, speakers and a camera that can see gestures. When the system does not understand, it can ask to have the gesture repeated, for example, or it can ask for a confirmation. Note, the presence of an occupant in a seat can even be confirmed by a word spoken by the occupant, for example, which can use a technology known as voice print if it is desired to identify the particular occupant.

It is also to be noted that the system can be trained to recognize essentially any object or object location that a human can recognize and even some that a human cannot recognize since the system can have the benefit of special illumination as discussed above. If desired, a particular situation such as the presence of a passenger's feet on the instrument panel, hand on a window frame, head against the side window, or even lying down with his or her head in the lap of the driver, for example, can be recognized and appropriate adjustments to a component performed.

Note, it has been assumed that the camera would be permanently mounted in the vehicle in the above discussion. This need not be the case and especially for some after-market products, the camera function can be supplied by a cell phone or other device and a holder appropriately (and removably) mounted in the vehicle.

Again the discussion above related primarily to sensing the interior of and automotive vehicle for the purposes of controlling a vehicle component such as a restraint system. When the vehicle is a shipping container then different classifications can be used depending on the objective. If it is to determine whether there is a life form moving within the container, a stowaway, for example, then that can be one classification. Another may be the size of a cargo box or whether it is moving. Still another may be whether there is an unauthorized entry in progress or that the door has been opened. Others include the presence of a particular chemical vapor, radiation, excessive temperature, excessive humidity, excessive shock, excessive vibration etc.

1.2.1 Eyesafe Application

When using optics, the use of eye-safe frequencies is critical if there is a possibility that a human occupant is in the scanning field. Currently, active IR uses the near IR range which has wavelengths below 1400 nanometers. Recent developments in the SWIR range (particularly greater than 1400 nm and more specifically in a range of 1400 nm to about 1700 nm) use indium gallium arsenide (InGaAs) for an imager permit much higher power transmissions as they are below the eye safety zone (see, e.g., Martin H. Ettenberg “A Little Night Vision”, Solutions for the Electronic Imaging Professional, March 2005, a Cygnus Publication).

Use of such eyesafe IR, i.e., greater than 1400 nm, to artificially illuminate an area being observed is significantly advantageous since much brighter illumination can be used. If images are taken in such an artificially illuminated area with a camera that is only sensitive in this range, through use of appropriate notch filter, then the effects of sunlight and other artificial light can be removed. This makes the system much less sensitive to sunlight effects. It also makes the system easier to record an image (or an edge image) of an empty seat, for example, that would be invariant to sun or other uncontrollable illumination and thus the system would be more robust. The edges of a seat, for example, would always look the same regardless of the external illumination.

Use of a near infrared frequency such as SWIR (above 1.4 microns) may be in the form of a laser spotlight which would pass eye safety requirements. This laser spotlight coupled with range gating, e.g., through use of a notch filter, permits easy segmentation of objects in the captured image and thus the rapid classification using, for example, a modular neural network or combination neural network system.

Application of artificial illumination in a frequency above 1400 nm can be implemented in any of the embodiments described herein wherein illumination is or can be provided to the vehicular compartment with images thereof being obtained subsequent to or contemporaneous with the illumination. Obtaining images in the presence of artificial illumination and in the absence of such illumination enables a subtraction of the images obtained during the illumination from those obtained without illumination with the resultant images being processable to determine information about any objects in the images, including for example, the presence of absence of such objects.

1.3 Ultrasonics and Optics

In some cases, a combination of an optical system such as a camera and an ultrasonic system can be used. In this case, the optical system can be used to acquire an image providing information as to the vertical and lateral dimensions of the scene and the ultrasound can be used to provide longitudinal information, for example.

A more accurate acoustic system for determining the distance to a particular object, or a part thereof, in the passenger compartment is exemplified by transducers 24 in FIG. 8E. In this case, three ultrasonic transmitter/receivers 24 are shown spaced apart mounted onto the A-pillar of the vehicle. Due to the wavelength, it is difficult to get a narrow beam using ultrasonics without either using high frequencies that have limited range or a large transducer. A commonly available 40 kHz transducer, for example, is about 1 cm. in diameter and emits a sonic wave that spreads at about a sixty-degree angle. To reduce this angle requires making the transducer larger in diameter. An alternate solution is to use several transducers and to phase the transmissions from the transducers so that they arrive at the intended part of the target in phase. Reflections from the selected part of the target are then reinforced whereas reflections from adjacent parts encounter interference with the result that the distance to the brightest portion within the vicinity of interest can be determined. A low-Q transducer may be necessary for this application.

By varying the phase of transmission from the three transducers 24, the location of a reflection source on a curved line can be determined. In order to locate the reflection source in space, at least one additional transmitter/receiver is required which is not co-linear with the others. The waves shown in FIG. 8E coming from the three transducers 24 are actually only the portions of the waves which arrive at the desired point in space together in phase. The effective direction of these wave streams can be varied by changing the transmission phase between the three transmitters 24.

A determination of the approximate location of a point of interest on the occupant can be accomplished by a CCD or CMOS array and appropriate analysis and the phasing of the ultrasonic transmitters is determined so that the distance to the desired point can be determined.

Although the combination of ultrasonics and optics has been described, it will now be obvious to others skilled in the art that other sensor types can be combined with either optical or ultrasonic transducers including weight sensors of all types as discussed below, as well as electric field, chemical, temperature, humidity, radiation, vibration, acceleration, velocity, position, proximity, capacitance, angular rate, heartbeat, radar, other electromagnetic, and other sensors.

1.4 Other Transducers

In FIG. 4, the ultrasonic transducers of the previous designs can be replaced by laser or other electromagnetic wave transducers or transceivers 8 and 9, which are connected to a microprocessor 20. As discussed above, these are only illustrative mounting locations and any of the locations described herein are suitable for particular technologies. Also, such electromagnetic transceivers are meant to include the entire electromagnetic spectrum including from X-rays to low frequencies where sensors such as capacitive or electric field sensors including so called “displacement current sensors”, and the auto-tune antenna sensor operate.

2. Adaptation

The process of adapting a system of occupant or object sensing transducers to a vehicle is described in the '996 application, section 2.

Referring again to FIG. 6, motion sensor 73 can be a discrete sensor that detects relative motion in the passenger compartment of the vehicle. Such sensors are frequently based on ultrasonics and can measure a change in the ultrasonic pattern that occurs over a short time period. Alternately, the subtracting of one position vector from a previous position vector to achieve a differential position vector can detect motion. For the purposes herein, a motion sensor will be used to mean either a particular device that is designed to detect motion for the creation of a special vector based on vector differences or a neural network trained to determine motion based on successive vectors.

An ultrasonic, optical or other sensor or transducer system 9 can be mounted on the upper portion of the front pillar, i.e., the A-Pillar, of the vehicle and a similar sensor system 6 can be mounted on the upper portion of the intermediate pillar, i.e., the B-Pillar. Each sensor system 6, 9 may comprise a transducer. The outputs of the sensor systems 6 and 9 can be input to a band pass filter 60 through a multiplex circuit 59 which can be switched in synchronization with a timing signal from the ultrasonic sensor drive circuit 58, for example, and then can be amplified by an amplifier 61. The band pass filter 60 removes a low frequency wave component from the output signal and also removes some of the noise. The envelope wave signal can be input to an analog/digital converter (ADC) 62 and digitized as measured data. The measured data can be input to a processing circuit 63, which can be controlled by the timing signal which can be in turn output from the sensor drive circuit 58. The above description applies primarily to systems based on ultrasonics and will differ somewhat for optical, electric field and other systems and for different vehicle types.

Each of the measured data can be input to a normalization circuit 64 and normalized. The normalized measured data can be input to the combination neural network (circuit) 65, for example, as wave data.

The output of the pressure or weight sensor(s) 7, 76 can be amplified by an amplifier 66 coupled to the pressure or weight sensor(s) 7, 76 and the amplified output can be input to an analog/digital converter and then directed to the neural network 65, for example, of the processor. Amplifier 66 can be useful in some embodiments but it may be dispensed with by constructing the sensors 7, 76 to provide a sufficiently strong output signal, and even possibly a digital signal. One manner to do this would be to construct the sensor systems with appropriate electronics.

The neural network 65 can be directly connected to the ADCs 68 and 69, the ADC associated with amplifier 66 and the normalization circuit 64. As such, information from each of the sensors in the system (a stream of data) can be passed directly to the neural network 65 for processing thereby. The streams of data from the sensors are usually not combined prior to the neural network 65 and the neural network 65 can be designed to accept the separate streams of data (e.g., at least a part of the data at each input node) and process them to provide an output indicative of the current occupancy state of the seat or of the vehicle. The neural network 65 thus includes or incorporates a plurality of algorithms derived by training in the manners discussed herein. Once the current occupancy state of the seat or vehicle is determined, it is possible to control vehicular components or systems, such as the airbag system or telematics system, in consideration of the current occupancy state of the seat or vehicle.

A discussion of the methodology of adapting a monitoring system to an automotive vehicle for the purpose primarily of controlling a component such as a restraint system is described with reference to FIGS. 28-37 of the '934 application.

3. Mounting Locations for and Quantity of Transducers

Ultrasonic transducers are relatively good at measuring the distance along a radius to a reflective object. An optical array, to be discussed now, on the other hand, can get accurate measurements in two dimensions, the lateral and vertical dimensions relative to the transducer. Assuming the optical array has dimensions of 100 by 100 as compared to an ultrasonic sensor that has a single dimension of 100, an optical array can therefore provide 100 times more information than the ultrasonic sensor. Most importantly, this vastly greater amount of information does not cost significantly more to obtain than the information from the ultrasonic sensor.

As illustrated in FIGS. 8A-8D, the optical sensors are typically located for an automotive vehicle at the positions where the desired information is available with the greatest resolution. These positions are typically in the center front and center rear of the occupancy seat and at the center on each side and top. This is in contrast to the optimum location for ultrasonic sensors, which are the corners of such a rectangle that outlines the seated volume. Styling and other constraints often prevent mounting of transducers at the optimum locations.

An optical infrared transmitter and receiver assembly is shown generally at 52 in FIG. 8B and is mounted onto the instrument panel facing the windshield. Assembly 52 can either be recessed below the upper face of the instrument panel or mounted onto the upper face of the instrument panel. Assembly 52, shown enlarged, comprises a source of infrared radiation, or another form of electromagnetic radiation, and a CCD, CMOS or other appropriate arrays of typically 160 pixels by 160 pixels. In this embodiment, the windshield is used to reflect the illumination light provided by the infrared radiation toward the objects in the passenger compartment and also reflect the light being reflected back by the objects in the passenger compartment, in a manner similar to the “heads-up” display which is now being offered on several automobile models. The “heads-up” display, of course, is currently used only to display information to the driver and is not used to reflect light from the driver to a receiver. Once again, unless one of the distance measuring systems as described below is used, this system alone cannot be used to determine distances from the objects to the sensor. Its main purpose is object identification and monitoring. Depending on the application, separate systems can be used for the driver and for the passenger. In some cases, the cameras located in the instrument panel which receive light reflected off of the windshield can be co-located with multiple lenses whereby the respective lenses aimed at the driver and passenger seats respectively.

Assembly 52 is actually about two centimeters or less in diameter and is shown greatly enlarged in FIG. 8B. Also, the reflection area on the windshield is considerably smaller than illustrated and special provisions are made to assure that this area of the windshield is flat and reflective as is done generally when heads-up displays are used. For cases where there is some curvature in the windshield, it can be at least partially compensated for by the CCD optics.

Transducers 23-25 are illustrated mounted onto the A-pillar of the vehicle, however, since these transducers are quite small, typically less than 2 cm on a side, they could alternately be mounted onto the windshield itself, or other convenient location which provides a clear view of the portion of the passenger compartment being monitored. Other preferred mounting locations include the headliner above and also the side of the seat. Some imagers are now being made that are less than 1 cm on a side.

FIG. 12 is a side view, with certain portions removed or cut away, of a portion of the passenger compartment of a vehicle showing preferred mounting locations of optical interior vehicle monitoring sensors (transmitter/receiver assemblies or transducers) 49, 50, 51, 54, 126, 127, 128, 129, and 130. Each of these sensors is illustrated as having a lens and is shown enlarged in size for clarity. In a typical actual device, the diameter of the lens is less than 2 cm and it protrudes from the mounting surface by less than 1 cm. Specially designed sensors can be considerably smaller. This small size renders these devices almost unnoticeable by vehicle occupants. Since these sensors are optical, it is important that the lens surface remains relatively clean. Control circuitry 132, which is coupled to each transducer, contains a self-diagnostic feature where the image returned by a transducer is compared with a stored image and the existence of certain key features is verified. If a receiver fails this test, a warning is displayed to the driver which indicates that cleaning of the lens surface is required.

The technology illustrated in FIG. 12 can be used for numerous purposes relating to monitoring of the space in the passenger compartment behind the driver including: (i) the determination of the presence and position of objects in the rear seat(s), (ii) the determination of the presence, position and orientation of child seats 2 in the rear seat, (iii) the monitoring of the rear of an occupant's head 33, (iv) the monitoring of the position of occupant 30, (v) the monitoring of the position of the occupant's knees 35, (vi) the monitoring of the occupant's position relative to the airbag 44, (vii) the measurement of the occupant's height, as well as other monitoring functions as described herein.

Information relating to the space behind the driver can be obtained by processing the data obtained by the sensors 126, 127, 128 and 129, which data would be in the form of images if optical sensors are used as in the preferred embodiment. Such information can be the presence of a particular occupying item or occupant, e.g., a rear facing child seat 2 as shown in FIG. 12, as well as the location or position of occupying items. Additional information obtained by the optical sensors can include an identification of the occupying item. The information obtained by the control circuitry by processing the information from sensors 126, 127, 128 and 129 may be used to affect any other system or component in the vehicle in a similar manner as the information from the sensors which monitor the front seat is used as described herein, such as the airbag system. Processing of the images obtained by the sensors to determine the presence, position and/or identification of any occupants or occupying item can be effected using a pattern recognition algorithm in any of the ways discussed herein, e.g., a trained neural network. For example, such processing can result in affecting a component or system in the front seat such as a display that allows the operator to monitor what is happening in the rear seat without having to turn his or her head.

In the preferred implementation, as shown in FIGS. 8A-8E, four transducer assemblies are positioned around the seat to be monitored, each can comprise one or more LEDs with a diverging lenses and a CMOS array. Although illustrated together, the illuminating source in many cases will not be co-located with the receiving array. The LED emits a controlled angle, 120° for example, diverging cone of infrared radiation that illuminates the occupant from both sides and from the front and rear. This angle is not to be confused with the field angle used in ultrasonic systems. With ultrasound, extreme care is required to control the field of the ultrasonic waves so that they will not create multipath effects and add noise to the system. With infrared, there is no reason, in the implementation now being described, other than to make the most efficient use of the infrared energy, why the entire vehicle cannot be flooded with infrared energy either from many small sources or from a few bright ones.

The image from each array is used to capture two dimensions of occupant position information, thus, the array of assembly 50 positioned on the windshield header, which is approximately 25% of the way laterally across the headliner in front of the driver, provides a both vertical and transverse information on the location of the driver. A similar view from the rear is obtained from the array of assembly 54 positioned behind the driver on the roof of the vehicle and above the seatback portion of the seat 72. As such, assembly 54 also provides both vertical and transverse information on the location of the driver. Finally, arrays of assemblies 49 and 51 provide both vertical and longitudinal driver location information. Another preferred location is the headliner centered directly above the seat of interest. The position of the assemblies 49-52 and 54 may differ from that shown in the drawings. In the invention, in order that the information from two or more of the assemblies 49-52 and 54 may provide a three-dimensional image of the occupant, or portion of the passenger compartment, the assemblies generally should not be arranged side-by-side. A side-by-side arrangement will provide two essentially identical views with the difference being a lateral shift. This does not enable a complete three-dimensional view of the occupant.

One important point concerns the location and number of optical assemblies. It is possible to use fewer than four such assemblies with a possible resulting loss in accuracy. The number of four was chosen so that either a forward or rear assembly or either of the side assemblies can be blocked by a newspaper, for example, without seriously degrading the performance of the system. Since drivers rarely are reading newspapers while driving, fewer than four arrays are usually adequate for the driver side. In fact, one is frequently sufficient. One camera is also usually sufficient for the passenger side if the goal of the system is classification only or if camera blockage is tolerated for occupant tracking.

The particular locations of the optical assemblies were chosen to give the most accurate information as to the locations of the occupant. This is based on an understanding of what information can be best obtained from a visual image. There is a natural tendency on the part of humans to try to gauge distance from the optical sensors directly. This is at best complicated involving focusing systems, stereographic systems, multiple arrays and triangulation, time of flight measurement, etc. What is not intuitive to humans is to not try to obtain this distance directly from apparatus or techniques associated with the mounting location. Whereas ultrasound is quite good for measuring distances from the transducer (the z-axis), optical systems are better at measuring distances in the vertical and lateral directions (the x and y-axes). Since the precise locations of the optical transducers are known, that is, the geometry of the transducer locations is known relative to the vehicle, there is no need to try to determine the displacement of an object of interest from the transducer (the z-axis) directly. This can more easily be done indirectly by another transducer. That is, the vehicle z-axis to one transducer is the camera x-axis to another.

Another preferred location of a transmitter/receiver for use with airbags is shown at 54 in FIG. 5. In this case, the device is attached to the steering wheel and gives an accurate determination of the distance of the driver's chest from the airbag module. This implementation would generally be used with another device such as 50 at another location. Additional details about mounting of a transducer on a cover of an airbag module are found in section 3 of the '996 application with reference to FIG. 13 therein, incorporated by reference herein.

One problem of the system using a transmitter/receiver 54 in FIG. 5 is that a driver may have inadvertently placed his hand over the transmitter/receiver 54, thus defeating the operation of the device. A second confirming transmitter/receiver 50 can therefore be placed at some other convenient position such as on the roof or headliner of the passenger compartment as shown in FIG. 5. This transmitter/receiver 50 operates in a manner similar to transmitter/receiver 54.

The applications described herein have been illustrated using the driver of the vehicle. The same systems of determining the position of the occupant relative to the airbag apply to the passenger, sometimes requiring minor modifications. Also of course, a similar system can be appropriately designed for other monitoring situations such as for cargo containers and truck trailers.

It is likely that the sensor required triggering time based on the position of the occupant will be different for the driver than for the passenger. Current systems are based primarily on the driver with the result that the probability of injury to the passenger is necessarily increased either by deploying the airbag too late or by failing to deploy the airbag when the position of the driver would not warrant it but the passenger's position would. With the use of occupant position sensors for both the passenger and driver, the airbag system can be individually optimized for each occupant and result in further significant injury reduction. In particular, either the driver or passenger system can be disabled if either the driver or passenger is out of position.

There is almost always a driver present in vehicles that are involved in accidents where an airbag is needed. Only about 30% of these vehicles, however, have a passenger. If the passenger is not present, there is usually no need to deploy the passenger side airbag. The occupant position sensor, when used for the passenger side with proper pattern recognition circuitry, can also ascertain whether or not the seat is occupied, and if not, can disable the deployment of the passenger side airbag and thereby save the cost of its replacement. A sophisticated pattern recognition system could even distinguish between an occupant and a bag of groceries or a box, for example, which in some cargo container or truck trailer monitoring situations is desired. Finally, there has been much written about the out of position child who is standing or otherwise positioned adjacent to the airbag, perhaps due to pre-crash braking. The occupant position sensor described herein can prevent the deployment of the airbag in this situation.

3.1 Single Camera, Dual Camera with Single Light Source

Many automobile companies are opting to satisfy the requirements of FMVSS-208 by using a weight only system such as the bladder or strain gage systems disclosed here. Such a system provides an elementary measure of the weight of the occupying object but does not give a reliable indication of its position, at least for automotive vehicles. It can also be easily confused by any object that weighs 60 or more pounds and that is interpreted as an adult. Weight only systems are also static systems in that due to vehicle dynamics that frequently accompany a pre crash braking event they are unable to track the position of the occupant. The load from seatbelts can confuse the system and therefore a special additional sensor must be used to measure seatbelt tension. In some systems, the device must be calibrated for each vehicle and there is some concern as to whether this calibration will be proper for the life on the vehicle.

A single camera can frequently provide considerably more information than a weight only system without the disadvantages of weight sensors and do so at a similar cost. Such a single camera in its simplest installation can categorize the occupancy state of the vehicle and determine whether the airbag should be suppressed due to an empty seat or the presence of a child of a size that corresponds to one weighing less than 60 pounds. Of course, a single camera can also easily do considerably more by providing a static out-of-position indication and, with the incorporation of a faster processor, dynamic out-of-position determination can also be provided. Thus, especially with the costs of microprocessors continuing to drop, a single camera system can easily provide considerably more functionality than a weight only system and yet stay in the same price range.

A principal drawback of a single camera system is that it can be blocked by the hand of an occupant or by a newspaper, for example. This is a rare event since the preferred mounting location for the camera is typically high in the vehicle such as on the headliner. Also, it is considerably less likely that the occupant will always be reading a newspaper, for example, and if he or she is not reading it when the system is first started up, or at any other time during the trip, the camera system will still get an opportunity to see the occupant when he or she is not being blocked and make the proper categorization. The ability of the system to track the occupant will be impaired but the system can assume that the occupant has not moved toward the airbag while reading the newspaper and thus the initial position of the occupant can be retained and used for suppression determination. Finally, the fact that the camera is blocked can be determined and the driver made aware of this fact in much the same manner that a seatbelt light notifies the driver that the passenger is not wearing his or her seatbelt.

The accuracy of a single camera system can be above 99% which significantly exceeds the accuracy of weight only systems. Nevertheless, some automobile manufacturers desire even greater accuracy and therefore opt for the addition of a second camera. Such a camera is usually placed on the opposite side of the occupant as the first camera. The first camera may be placed on or near the dome light, for example, and the second camera can be on the headliner above the side door. A dual camera system such as this can operate more accurately in bright daylight situations where the window area needs to be ignored in the view of the camera that is mounted near the dome.

Sometimes, in a dual camera system, only a single light source is used. This provides a known shadow pattern for the second camera and helps to accentuate the edges of the occupying item rendering classification easier. Any of the forms of structured light can also be used and through these and other techniques the corresponding points in the two images can more easily be determined thus providing a three-dimensional model of the occupant or occupying object in the case of other vehicle types such as a cargo container or truck trailer.

As a result, the current assignee has developed a low cost single camera system which has been extensively tested for the most difficult problem of automobile occupant sensing but is nevertheless also applicable for monitoring of other vehicles such as cargo containers and truck trailers. The automotive occupant position sensor system uses a CMOS camera in conjunction with pattern recognition algorithms for the discrimination of out-of-position occupants and rear facing child safety seats. A single imager, located strategically within the occupant compartment, is coupled with an infrared LED that emits unfocused, wide-beam pulses toward the passenger volume. These pulses, which reflect off of objects in the passenger seat and are captured by the camera, contain information for classification and location determination in approximately 10 msec. The decision algorithm processes the returned information using a uniquely trained neural network, which may not be necessary in the simpler cargo container or truck trailer monitoring cases. The logic of the neural network was developed through extensive in-vehicle training with thousands of realistic occupant size and position scenarios. Although the optical occupant position sensor can be used in conjunction with other technologies (such as weight sensing, seat belt sensing, crash severity sensing, etc.), it is a stand-alone system meeting the requirements of FMVSS-208. This device will be discussed below.

3.2 Location of the Transducers

Any of the transducers discussed herein such as an active pixel or other camera can be arranged in various locations in the vehicle including in a headliner, roof, ceiling, rear view mirror assembly, an A-pillar, a B-pillar and a C-pillar or a side wall or even a door in the case of a cargo container or truck trailer. Images of the front seat area or the rear seat area can be obtained by proper placement and orientation of the transducers such as cameras. The rear view mirror assembly can be a good location for a camera, particularly if it is attached to the portion of the mirror support that does not move when the occupant is adjusting the mirror. Cameras at this location can get a good view of the driver, passenger as well as the environment surrounding the vehicle and particularly in the front of the vehicle. It is an ideal location for automatic dimming headlight cameras.

3.3 Fisheye Lens, Pan and Zoom

Infrared waves are shown coming from the front and back transducer assemblies 54 and 55 in FIG. 8C. FIG. 8D illustrates two optical systems each having a source of infrared radiation and a CCD, CMOS, FPR, TFA or QWIP array receiver. The price of such arrays has dropped dramatically recently making most of them practical for interior and exterior vehicle monitoring. In this embodiment, transducers 54 and 55 are CMOS arrays having 160 pixels by 160 pixels covered by a lens. In some applications, this can create a “fisheye” effect whereby light from a wide variety of directions can be captured. One such transducer placed by the dome light or other central position in the vehicle headliner, such as the transducer designated 54, can monitor the entire vehicle interior with sufficient resolution to determine the occupancy of the vehicle, for example. Imagers such as those used herein are available from Marshall Electronics Inc. of Culver City, Calif. and others. A fisheye lens is “ . . . a wide-angle photographic lens that covers an angle of about 180°, producing a circular image with exaggerated foreshortening in the center and increasing distortion toward the periphery”. (The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition, 1992 by Houghton Mifflin Company). This distortion of a fisheye lens can be substantially changed by modifying the shape of the lens to permit particular portions of the interior passenger compartment to be observed. Also, in many cases the full 180° is not desirable and a lens which captures a smaller angle may be used. Although primarily spherical lenses are illustrated herein, it is understood that the particular lens design will depend on the location in the vehicle and the purpose of the particular receiver. A fisheye lens can be particularly useful for some truck trailer, cargo container, railroad car and automobile trunk monitoring cases.

A camera that provides for pan and zoom using a fisheye lens is described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,185,667 and is applicable to at least one of the inventions disclosed herein. Here, however, it is usually not necessary to remove the distortion since the image will in general not be viewed by a human but will be analyzed by software. One exception is when the image is sent to emergency services via telematics. In that case, the distortion removal is probably best done at the EMS site.

Although a fisheye camera has been discussed above, other types of distorting lenses or mirrors can be used to accomplished particular objectives. A distorting lens or mirror, for example, can have the effect of dividing the image into several sub-pictures so that the available pixels can cover more than one area of a vehicle interior or exterior. Alternately, the volume in close proximity to an airbag, for example, can be allocated a more dense array of pixels so that measurements of the location of an occupant relative to the airbag can be more accurately achieved. Numerous other objectives can now be envisioned which can now be accomplished with a reduction in the number of cameras or imagers through either distortion or segmenting of the optical field.

Another problem associated with lens is cleanliness. In general, the optical systems of these inventions comprise methods to test for the visibility through the lens and issue a warning when that visibility begins to deteriorate. Many methods exist for accomplishing this feat including the taking of an image when the vehicle is empty and not moving and at night. Using neural networks, for example, or some other comparison technique, a comparison of the illumination reaching the imager can be compared with what is normal. A network can be trained on empty seats, for example, in all possible positions and compared with the new image. Or, those pixels that correspond to any movable surface in the vehicle can be removed from the image and a brightness test on the remaining pixels used to determine lens cleanliness.

Once a lens has been determined to be dirty, then either a warning light can be set telling the operator to visit the dealer or a method of cleaning the lens automatically invoked. One such method for night vision systems is disclosed in WO0234572. Another, which is one on the inventions disclosed herein, is to cover the lens with a thin film. This film may be ultrasonically excited thereby greatly minimizing the tendency for it to get dirty and/or the film can be part of a roll of film that is advanced when the diagnostic system detects a dirty lens thereby placing a new clean surface in front of the imager. The film roll can be sized such that under normal operation, the roll would last some period such as 20 years. A simple, powerless mechanism can be designed that will gradually advance the film across the lens over a period of 10 to 20 years using the normal daily thermal cycling to cause relative expansion and contraction of materials with differing thermal expansion coefficients.

4. 3D Cameras

Optical sensors can be used to obtain a three-dimensional measurement of the object through a variety of methods that use time of flight, modulated light and phase measurement, quantity of light received within a gated window, structured light and triangulation etc. Some of these techniques are discussed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,393,133 and below.

4.1 Stereo

One method of obtaining a three-dimensional image is illustrated in FIG. 8D wherein transducer 24 is an infrared source having a wide transmission angle such that the entire contents of the front driver's seat is illuminated. Receiving imager transducers 23 and 25 are shown spaced apart so that a stereographic analysis can be made by the control circuitry 20. This circuitry 20 contains a microprocessor with appropriate pattern recognition algorithms along with other circuitry as described above. In this case, the desired feature to be located is first selected from one of the two returned images from either imaging transducer 23 or 25. The software then determines the location of the same feature, through correlation analysis or other methods, on the other image and thereby, through analysis familiar to those skilled in the art, determines the distance of the feature from the transducers by triangulation.

As the distance between the two or more imagers used in the stereo construction increases, a better and better model of the object being imaged can be obtained since more of the object is observable. On the other hand, it becomes increasingly difficult to pair up points that occur in both images. Given sufficient computational resources, this not a difficult problem but with limited resources and the requirement to track a moving occupant during a crash, for example, the problem becomes more difficult. One method to ease the problem is to project onto the occupant, a structured light that permits a recognizable pattern to be observed and matched up in both images. The source of this projection should lie midway between the two imagers. By this method, a rapid correspondence between the images can be obtained.

On the other hand, if a source of structured light is available at a different location than the imager, then a simpler three-dimensional image can be obtained using a single imager. Furthermore, the model of the occupant really only needs to be made once during the classification phase of the process and there is usually sufficient time to accomplish that model with ordinary computational power. Once the model has been obtained, then only a few points need be tracked by either one or both of the cameras.

Another method exists whereby the displacement between two images from two cameras is estimated using a correlator. Such a fast correlator has been developed by Professor Lukin of Kyiv, Ukraine in conjunction with his work on noise radar. This correlator is very fast and can probably determine the distance to an occupant at a rate sufficient for tracking purposes.

4.2 Distance by Focusing

In the above-described imaging systems, a lens within a receptor captures the reflected infrared light from the head or chest of the driver, or other object to be monitored, and displays it onto an imaging device (CCD, CMOS, FPA, TFA, QWIP or equivalent) array. For the discussion of FIG. 5, at least, either CCD or the word “imager” will be used to include all devices which are capable of converting light frequencies, including infrared, into electrical signals. In one method of obtaining depth from focus, the CCD is scanned and the focal point of the lens is altered, under control of an appropriate circuit, until the sharpest image of the driver's head or chest, or other object, results and the distance is then known from the focusing circuitry. This trial and error approach may require the taking of several images and thus may be time consuming and perhaps too slow for occupant tracking during pre-crash braking.

The time and precision of this measurement is enhanced if two receptors (e.g., lenses) are used which can either project images onto a single CCD or onto separate CCDs. In the first case, one of the lenses could be moved to bring the two images into coincidence while in the other case, the displacement of the images needed for coincidence would be determined mathematically. Other systems could be used to keep track of the different images such as the use of filters creating different infrared frequencies for the different receptors and again using the same CCD array. In addition to greater precision in determining the location of the occupant, the separation of the two receptors can also be used to minimize the effects of hands, arms or other extremities which might be very close to the airbag. In this case, where the receptors are mounted high on the dashboard on either side of the steering wheel, an arm, for example, would show up as a thin object but much closer to the airbag than the larger body parts and, therefore, easily distinguished and eliminated, permitting the sensors to determine the distance to the occupant's chest. This is one example of the use of pattern recognition.

An alternate method is to use a lens with a short focal length. In this case, the lens is mechanically focused, e.g., automatically, directly or indirectly, by the control circuitry 20, to determine the clearest image and thereby obtain the distance to the object. This is similar to certain camera auto-focusing systems such as one manufactured by Fuji of Japan. Again this is a time consuming method. Other methods can be used as described in patents and patent applications referenced above.

Instead of focusing the lens, the lens could be moved relative to the array to thereby adjust the image on the array. Instead of moving the lens, the array could be moved to achieve the proper focus. In addition, it is also conceivable that software could be used to focus the image without moving the lens or the array especially if at least two images are available.

An alternative is to use the focusing systems described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,193,124 and 5,003,166. These systems are quite efficient requiring only two images with different camera settings. Thus, if there is sufficient time to acquire an image, change the camera settings and acquire a second image, this system is fine and can be used with the inventions disclosed herein. Once the position of the occupant has been determined for one point in time, then the process may not have to be repeated as a measurement of the size of a part of an occupant can serve as a measure of its relative location compared to the previous image from which the range was obtained. Thus, other than the requirement of a somewhat more expensive imager, the system of the '124 and '166 patents is fine. The accuracy of the range is perhaps limited to a few centimeters depending on the quality of the imager used. Also, if multiple ranges to multiple objects are required, then the process becomes a bit more complicated.

5. Weight Measurement and Biometrics

One way to determine motion of the occupant(s) is to monitor the weight distribution of the occupant whereby changes in weight distribution after an accident would be highly suggestive of movement of the occupant. A system for determining the weight distribution of the occupants can be integrated or otherwise arranged in the seats 3 and 4 of the vehicle and several patents and publications describe such systems.

More generally, any sensor that determines the presence and health state of an occupant can also be integrated into the vehicle interior monitoring system in accordance with the inventions herein. For example, a sensitive motion sensor can determine whether an occupant is breathing and a chemical sensor, such as accomplished using SAW technology, can determine the amount of carbon dioxide, or the concentration of carbon dioxide, in the air in the vehicle, which can be correlated to the health state of the occupant(s). The motion sensor and chemical sensor can be designed to have a fixed operational field situated near the occupant. In the alternative, the motion sensor and chemical sensor can be adjustable and adapted to adjust their operational field in conjunction with a determination by an occupant position and location sensor that would determine the location of specific parts of the occupant's body such as his or her chest or mouth. Furthermore, an occupant position and location sensor can be used to determine the location of the occupant's eyes and determine whether the occupant is conscious, that is, whether his or her eyes are open or closed or moving.

Chemical sensors can also be used to detect whether there is blood present in the vehicle such as after an accident. Additionally, microphones can detect whether there is noise in the vehicle caused by groaning, yelling, etc., and transmit any such noise through the cellular or similar connection to a remote listening facility using a telematics communication system such as operated by OnStar™.

Pressure or weight sensors 7, 76 are also included in the system shown in FIG. 6. Although strain gage-type sensors are schematically illustrated mounted to the supporting structure of the seat portion 4, and a bladder pressure sensor mounted in the seat portion 4, any other type of pressure or weight sensor can be used including mat or butt spring sensors. Strain gage sensors are described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,242,701 as well as herein. Weight can be used to confirm the occupancy of the seat, i.e., the presence or absence of an occupant as well as whether the seat is occupied by a light or heavy object. In the latter case, a measured weight of less than 60 pounds is often determinative of the presence of a child seat whereas a measured weight of greater than 60 pounds is often indicative of the absence of a child seat. The weight sensors 7 can also be used to determine the weight distribution of the occupant of the seat and thereby ascertain whether the occupant is moving and the position of the occupant. As such, the weight sensors 7 could be used to confirm the position and motion of the occupant. The measured pressure or weight or distribution thereof can also be used in combination with the data from the transmitter/receiver assemblies 49, 50, 51, 52 and 54 of FIG. 8C to provide an identification of the occupants in the seat.

Additional details about various weight sensing systems are set forth in the '996 application, section 6, with reference to FIGS. 6A, 6B, 32, 33 and 33A therein.

5.1 Strain Gage Weight Sensors

Strain gage and other weight sensors for use in embodiments of the invention are shown in FIGS. 42-47 in the '934 application. Strain gage weight sensors can also be mounted in other locations such as within a cavity within a seat cushion. The strain gage can be mounted on a flexible diaphragm that flexes and thereby strains the strain gage as the seat is loaded.

5.2 Combined Spatial and Weight

A novel occupant position sensor for a vehicle, for determining the position of the occupant, comprises a weight sensor for determining the weight of an occupant of a seat and a processor for receiving the determined weight of the occupant from the weight sensor and determining the position of the occupant based at least in part on the determined weight of the occupant. The position of the occupant could also be determined based in part on waves received from the space above the seat, data from seat position sensors, reclining angle sensors, etc.

Although spatial sensors such as ultrasonic, electric field and optical occupant sensors can accurately identify and determine the location of an occupying item in the vehicle, a determination of the mass of the item is less accurate as it can be fooled in some cases by a thick but light winter coat, for example. Therefore, it is desirable, when the economics permit, to provide a combined system that includes both weight and spatial sensors. Such a system permits a fine tuning of the deployment time and the amount of gas in the airbag to match the position and the mass of the occupant. If this is coupled with a smart crash severity sensor, then a true smart airbag system can result, as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,532,408.

As disclosed in the current assignee's patents, the combination of a reduced number of transducers including weight and spatial can result from a pruning process starting from a larger number of sensors. For example, such a process can begin with four load cells and four ultrasonic sensors and after a pruning process, a system containing two ultrasonic sensors and one load cell can result. At least one of the inventions disclosed herein is therefore not limited to any particular number or combination of sensors and the optimum choice for a particular vehicle will depend on many factors including the specifications of the vehicle manufacturer, cost, accuracy desired, availability of mounting locations and the chosen technologies.

5.3 Face Recognition

A neural network, or other pattern recognition system, can be trained to recognize certain people as permitted operators of a vehicle or for granting access to a cargo container or truck trailer. In this case, if a non-recognized person attempts to operate the vehicle or to gain access, the system can disable the vehicle and/or sound an alarm or send a message to a remote site via telematics. Since it is unlikely that an unauthorized operator will resemble the authorized operator, the neural network system can be quite tolerant of differences in appearance of the operator. The system defaults to where a key or other identification system must be used in the case that the system doesn't recognize the operator or the owner wishes to allow another person to operate the vehicle or have access to the container. The transducers used to identify the operator can be any of the types described herein. A preferred method is to use optical imager-based transducers perhaps in conjunction with a weight sensor for automotive applications. This is necessary due to the small size of the features that need to be recognized for a high accuracy of recognition. An alternate system uses an infrared laser, which can be modulated to provide three-dimensional measurements, to irradiate or illuminate the operator and a CCD or CMOS device to receive the reflected image. In this case, the recognition of the operator is accomplished using a pattern recognition system such as described in Popesco, V. and Vincent, J. M. “Location of Facial Features Using a Boltzmann Machine to Implement Geometric Constraints”, Chapter 14 of Lisboa, P. J. G. and Taylor, M. J. Editors, Techniques and Applications of Neural Networks, Ellis Horwood Publishers, New York, 1993. In the present case, a larger CCD element array containing 50,000 or more elements would typically be used instead of the 16 by 16 or 256 element CCD array used by Popesco and Vincent.

Once an optic-based system is present in a vehicle, other options can be enabled such as eye-tracking as a data input device or to detect drowsiness, as discussed above, and even lip reading as a data input device or to augment voice input. This is discussed, for example, Eisenberg, Anne, “Beyond Voice Recognition to a Computer That Reads Lips”, New York Times, Sep. 11, 2003. Lip reading can be implemented in a vehicle through the use of IR illumination and training of a pattern recognition algorithm, such as a neural network or a combination network. This is one example of where an adaptive neural or combination network can be employed that learns as it gains experience with a particular driver. The word “radio”, for example, can be associated with lip motions when the vehicle is stopped or moving slowly and then at a later time when the vehicle is traveling at high speed with considerable wind noise, the voice might be difficult for the system to understand. When augmented with lip reading, the word “radio” can be more accurately recognized. Thus, the combination of lip reading and voice recognition can work together to significantly improve accuracy.

Face recognition can of course be done in two or three dimensions and can involve the creation of a model of the person's head that can aid when illumination is poor, for example. Three dimensions are available if multiple two dimensional images are acquired as the occupant moves his or her head or through the use of a three-dimensional camera. A three-dimensional camera generally has two spaced-apart lenses plus software to combine the two views. Normally, the lenses are relatively close together but this may not need to be the case and significantly more information can be acquired if the lenses are spaced further apart and in some cases, even such that one camera has a frontal view and the other a side view, for example. The software is complicated for such cases but the system becomes more robust and less likely to be blocked by a newspaper, for example. A scanning laser radar, PMD or similar system with a modulated beam or with range gating as described above can also be used to obtain three-dimensional information or a 3D image.

Eye tracking as disclosed in Jacob, “Eye Tracking in Advanced Interface Design”, Robert J. K. Jacob, Human-Computer Interaction Lab, Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, D.C, can be used by vehicle operator to control various vehicle components such as the turn signal, lights, radio, air conditioning, telephone, Internet interactive commands, etc. much as described in U.S. Pat. No. 7,126,583. The display used for the eye tracker can be a heads-up display reflected from the windshield or it can be a plastic electronics display located either in the visor or the windshield.

The eye tracker works most effectively in dim light where the driver's eyes are sufficiently open that the cornea and retina are clearly distinguishable. The direction of operator's gaze is determined by calculation of the center of pupil and the center of the iris that are found by illuminating the eye with infrared radiation. FIG. 8E illustrates a suitable arrangement for illuminating eye along the same axis as the pupil camera. The location of occupant's eyes must be first determined as described herein before eye tracking can be implemented. In FIG. 8E, imager system 52, 54, or 56 are candidate locations for eye tracker hardware.

The technique is to shine a collimated beam of infrared light on to be operator's eyeball producing a bright corneal reflection can be bright pupil reflection. Imaging software analyzes the image to identify the large bright circle that is the pupil and a still brighter dot which is the corneal reflection and computes the center of each of these objects. The line of the gaze is determined by connecting the centers of these two reflections.

It is usually necessary only to track a single eye as both eyes tend to look at the same object. In fact, by checking that both eyes are looking at the same object, many errors caused by the occupant looking through the display onto the road or surrounding environment can be eliminated

Object selection with a mouse or mouse pad, as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 7,126,583, is accomplished by pointing at the object and depressing a button. Using eye tracking, an additional technique is available based on the length of time the operator gazes at the object. In the implementations herein, both techniques are available. In the simulated mouse case, the operator gazes at an object, such as the air conditioning control, and depresses a button on the steering wheel, for example, to select the object. Alternately, the operator merely gazes at the object for perhaps one-half second and the object is automatically selected. Both techniques can be implemented simultaneously allowing the operator to freely choose between them. The dwell time can be selectable by the operator as an additional option. Typically, the dwell times will range from about 0.1 seconds to about 1 second.

The problem of finding the eyes and tracking the head of the driver, for example, is handled in Smeraldi, F., Carmona, J. B., “Saccadic search with Garbor features applied to eye detection and real-time head tracking”, Image and Vision Computing 18 (2000) 323-329, Elsevier Science B. V. The Saccadic system described is a very efficient method of locating the most distinctive part of a persons face, the eyes, and in addition to finding the eyes, a modification of the system can be used to recognize the driver. The system makes use of the motion of the subject's head to locate the head prior to doing a search for the eyes using a modified Garbor decomposition method. By comparing two consecutive frames, the head can usually be located if it is in the field of view of the camera. Although this is the preferred method, other eye location and tracking methods can also be used as reported in the literature and familiar to those skilled in the art.

5.4 Heartbeat and Health State

In addition to the use of transducers to determine the presence and location of occupants in a vehicle, other sensors can also be used. For example, as discussed above, a heartbeat sensor, which determines the number and presence of heartbeats, can also be arranged in the vehicle. Heartbeat sensors can be adapted to differentiate between a heartbeat of an adult, a heartbeat of a child and a heartbeat of an animal. As its name implies, a heartbeat sensor detects a heartbeat, and the magnitude thereof, of a human occupant of the seat or other position, if such a human occupant is present. The output of the heartbeat sensor is input to the processor of the interior monitoring system. One heartbeat sensor for use in the invention may be of the types as disclosed in McEwan in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,573,012 and 5,766,208. The heartbeat sensor can be positioned at any convenient position relative to the seats or other appropriate location where occupancy is being monitored. A preferred automotive location is within the vehicle seatback.

This type of micropower impulse radar (MIR) sensor is not believed to have been used in an interior monitoring system in the past. It can be used to determine the motion of an occupant and thus can determine his or her heartbeat (as evidenced by motion of the chest), for example. Such an MIR sensor can also be arranged to detect motion in a particular area in which the occupant's chest would most likely be situated or could be coupled to an arrangement which determines the location of the occupant's chest and then adjusts the operational field of the MIR sensor based on the determined location of the occupant's chest. A motion sensor utilizing a micro-power impulse radar (MIR) system as disclosed, for example, in U.S. Pat. No. 5,361,070, as well as many other patents by the same inventor. Motion sensing is accomplished by monitoring a particular range from the sensor as disclosed in that patent. MIR is one form of radar that has applicability to occupant sensing and can be mounted at various locations in the vehicle. Other forms include, among others, ultra wideband (UWB) by the Time Domain Corporation and noise radar (NR) by Professor Konstantin Lukin of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine Institute of Radiophysics and Electronics. Radar has an advantage over ultrasonic sensors in that data can be acquired at a higher speed and thus the motion of an occupant can be more easily tracked. The ability to obtain returns over the entire occupancy range is somewhat more difficult than with ultrasound resulting in a more expensive system overall. MIR, UWB or NR have additional advantages in their lack of sensitivity to temperature variation and have a comparable resolution to about 40 kHz ultrasound. Resolution comparable to higher frequency is of course possible using millimeter waves, for example. Additionally, multiple MIR, UWB or NR sensors can be used when high-speed tracking of the motion of an occupant during a crash is required since they can be individually pulsed without interfering with each other through frequency, time or code division multiplexing or other multiplexing schemes.

Other methods have been reported for measuring heartbeat including vibrations introduced into a vehicle and variations in the electric field in the vicinity of where an occupant might reside. All such methods are considered encompassed by the teachings of at least one of the inventions disclosed herein. The detection of a heartbeat regardless of how it is accomplished is indicative of the presence of a living being within the vehicle and such a detection as part of an occupant presence detection system is novel to at least one of the inventions disclosed herein. Similarly, any motion of an object that is not induced by the motion of the vehicle itself is indicative of the presence of a living being and thus part of the teachings herein. The sensing of occupant motion regardless of how it is accomplished when used in a system to affect another vehicle system is contemplated herein.

6. Illumination

6.1 Infrared Light

Many forms of illumination can of course be used. Near infrared is a preferred source since it can be produced relatively inexpensively with LEDs and is not seen by vehicle occupants or others outside of the vehicle. The use of spatially modulated (as in structured light) and temporally modulated (as in amplitude, frequency, pulse, code, random or other such methods) permits additional information to be obtained such as a three-dimensional image as disclosed by the current assignee in earlier patents. Infrared is also interesting since the human body naturally emits IR and this fact can be used to positively identify that there is a human occupying a vehicle seat and to determine fairly accurately the size of the occupant. This technique only works when the ambient temperature is different from body temperature, which is most of the time. In some climates, it is possible that the interior temperature of a vehicle can reach or exceed 100° F., but it is unlikely to stay at that temperature for long as humans find such a temperature uncomfortable. However, it is even more unlikely that such a temperature will exist except when there is significant natural illumination in the visible part of the spectrum. Thus, a visual size determination is possible especially since it is very unlikely that such an occupant will be wearing heavy or thick clothing. Passive infrared, used of course with an imaging system, is thus a viable technique for the identification of a human occupant if used in conjunction with an optical system for high temperature situations. Even if the ambient temperature is nearly the same as body temperature, there will still be contrasts in the image which are sufficient to differentiate an occupant or his or her face from the background. Whereas a single pixel sensor, as in prior art patents to Corrado and Mattes, could give false results, an imaging system such as a focal plane array as disclosed herein can still operate effectively.

Passive IR is also a good method of finding the eyes and other features of the occupant since hair, some hats and other obscuring items frequently do not interfere with the transmission of IR. When active IR illumination is used, the eyes are particularly easy to find due to corneal reflection and the eyes will be dilated at night when finding the eyes is most important. Even in glare situations, where the glare is coming through the windshield, passive IR is particularly useful since glass blocks most IR with wavelengths beyond 1.1 microns and thus the glare will not interfere with the imaging of the face.

Particular frequencies of active IR are especially useful for external monitoring. Except for monitoring objects close to the vehicle, most radar systems have a significant divergence angle making imaging more that a few meters from the vehicle problematic. Thus there is typically not enough information from a scene say 100 meters away to permit the monitor to obtain an image that would permit classification of sensed objects. Using radar, it is difficult to distinguish a car from a truck or a parked car at the side of the road from one on the same lane as the vehicle or from an advertising sign, for example. Normal visual imaging also will not work in bad weather situations however some frequencies of IR do penetrate fog, rain and snow sufficiently well as to permit the monitoring of the road at a significant distance and with enough resolution to permit imaging and thus classification even in the presence of rain, snow and fog.

As mentioned herein, there are various methods of illuminating the object or occupant in the passenger compartment. A scanning point of IR can be used to overcome reflected sunlight. A structured pattern can be used to help achieve a three-dimensional representation of the vehicle contents. An image can be compared with illumination and without in an attempt to eliminate the effects on natural and uncontrollable illumination. This generally doesn't work very well since the natural illumination can overpower the IR. Thus it is usually better to develop two pattern recognition algorithms, one for IR illumination and one for natural illumination. For the natural illumination case, the entire visual and near visual spectrum can be used or some subset of it. For the case where a rolling shutter is used, the process can be speeded up substantially if one line of pixels is subtracted from the adjacent line where the illumination is turned on for every other row and off for the intervening rows. In addition to structured light, there are many other methods of obtaining a 3D image as discussed above.

6.2 Structured Light

In the applications discussed and illustrated above, the source and receiver of the electromagnetic radiation have frequently been mounted in the same package. This is not necessary and in some implementations, the illumination source will be mounted elsewhere. For example, a laser beam can be used which is directed along an axis which bisects the angle between the center of the seat volume, or other volume of interest, and two of the arrays. Such a beam may come from the A-Pillar, for example. The beam, which may be supplemental to the main illumination system, provides a point reflection from the occupying item that, in most cases, can be seen by two receivers, even if they are significantly separated from each other, making it easier to identify corresponding parts in the two images. Triangulation thereafter can precisely determination the location of the illuminated point. This point can be moved, or a pattern of points provided, to provide even more information. In another case where it is desired to track the head of the occupant, for example, several such beams can be directed at the occupant's head during pre-crash braking or even during a crash to provide the fastest information as to the location of the head of the occupant for the fastest tracking of the motion of the occupant's head. Since only a few pixels are involved, even the calculation time is minimized.

In most of the applications above, the assumption has been made that either a uniform field of light or a scanning spot of light will be provided. This need not be the case. The light that is emitted or transmitted to illuminate the object can be structured light. Structured light can take many forms starting with, for example, a rectangular or other macroscopic pattern of light and dark that can be superimposed on the light by passing it through a filter. If a similar pattern is interposed between the reflections and the camera, a sort of pseudo-interference pattern can result sometimes known as Moiré patterns. A similar effect can be achieved by polarizing transmitted light so that different parts of the object that is being illuminated are illuminated with light of different polarization. Once again, by viewing the reflections through a similarly polarized array, information can be obtained as to where the source of light came from which is illuminating a particular object. Any of the transmitter/receiver assemblies or transducers in any of the embodiments above using optics can be designed to use structured light.

Usually the source of the structured light is displaced either vertically, laterally or axially from the imager, but this need not necessarily be the case. One excellent example of the use of structured light to determine a 3D image where the source of the structured light and the imager are on the same axis is illustrated in U.S. Pat. No. 5,003,166. Here, the third dimension is obtained by measuring the degree of blur of the pattern as reflected from the object. This can be done since the focal point of the structured light is different from the camera. This is accomplished by projecting it through its own lens system and then combining the two paths through the use of a beam splitter. The use of this or any other form of structured light is within the scope of at least one of the inventions disclosed herein. There are so many methods that the details of all of them cannot be enumerated here.

One consideration when using structured light is that the source of structured light should not generally be exactly co-located with the array because in this case, the pattern projected will not change as a function of the distance between the array and the object and thus the distance between the array and the object cannot be determined, except by the out-of-focus and similar methods discussed above. Thus, it is usually necessary to provide a displacement between the array and the light source. For example, the light source can surround the array, be on top of the array or on one side of the array. The light source can also have a different virtual source, i.e., it can appear to come from behind of the array or in front of the array, a variation of the out-of-focus method discussed above.

For a laterally displaced source of structured light, the goal is to determine the direction that a particular ray of light had when it was transmitted from the source. Then, by knowing which pixels were illuminated by the reflected light ray along with the geometry of the vehicle, the distance to the point of reflection off of the object can be determined. If a particular light ray, for example, illuminates an object surface which is near to the source, then the reflection off of that surface will illuminate a pixel at a particular point on the imaging array. If the reflection of the same ray however occurs from a more distant surface, then a different pixel will be illuminated in the imaging array. In this manner, the distance from the surface of the object to the array can be determined by triangulation formulas. Similarly, if a given pixel is illuminated in the imager from a reflection of a particular ray of light from the transmitter, and knowing the direction that that ray of light was sent from the transmitter, then the distance to the object at the point of reflection can be determined. If each ray of light is individually recognizable and therefore can be correlated to the angle at which it was transmitted, a full three-dimensional image can be obtained of the object that simplifies the identification problem. This can be done with a single imager.

One particularly interesting implementation due to its low cost is to project one or more dots or other simple shapes onto the occupant from a position which is at an angle relative to the occupant such as 10 to 45 degrees from the camera location. These dots will show up as bright spots even in bright sunlight and their location on the image will permit the position of the occupant to be determined. Since the parts of the occupant are all connected with relative accuracy, the position of the occupant can now be accurately determined using only one simple camera. Additionally, the light that makes up the dots can be modulated and the distance from the dot source can then be determined if there is a receiver at the light source and appropriate circuitry such as used with a scanning range meter.

The coding of the light rays coming from the transmitter can be accomplished in many ways. One method is to polarize the light by passing the light through a filter whereby the polarization is a combination of the amount and angle of the polarization. This gives two dimensions that can therefore be used to fix the angle that the light was sent. Another method is to superimpose an analog or digital signal onto the light which could be done, for example, by using an addressable light valve, such as a liquid crystal filter, electrochromic filter, or, preferably, a garnet crystal array. Each pixel in this array would be coded such that it could be identified at the imager or other receiving device. Any of the modulation schemes could be applied such as frequency, phase, amplitude, pulse, random or code modulation.

The techniques described above can depend upon either changing the polarization or using the time, spatial or frequency domains to identify particular transmission angles with particular reflections. Spatial patterns can be imposed on the transmitted light which generally goes under the heading of structured light. The concept is that if a pattern is identifiable, then either the direction of transmitted light can be determined or, if the transmission source is co-linear with the receiver, then the pattern differentially expands or contracts relative to the field of view as it travels toward the object and then, by determining the size or focus of the received pattern, the distance to the object can be determined. In some cases, Moiré pattern techniques are utilized.

When the illumination source is not placed on the same axis as the receiving array, it is typically placed at an angle such as 45 degrees. At least two other techniques can be considered. One is to place the illumination source at 90 degrees to the imager array. In this case, only those surface elements that are closer to the receiving array than previous surfaces are illuminated. Thus, significant information can be obtained as to the profile of the object. In fact, if no object is occupying the seat, then there will be no reflections except from the seat itself. This provides a very powerful technique for determining whether the seat is occupied and where the initial surfaces of the occupying item are located. A combination of the above techniques can be used with temporally or spatially varying illumination. Taking images with the same imager but with illumination from different directions can also greatly enhance the ability to obtain three-dimensional information.

The particular radiation field of the transmitting transducer can also be important to some implementations of at least one of the inventions disclosed herein. In some techniques, the object which is occupying the seat is the only part of the vehicle which is illuminated. Extreme care is exercised in shaping the field of light such that this is true. For example, the objects are illuminated in such a way that reflections from the door panel do not occur. Ideally, if only the items which occupy the seat can be illuminated, then the problem of separating the occupant from the interior vehicle passenger compartment surfaces can be more easily accomplished. Sending illumination from both sides of the vehicle across the vehicle can accomplish this.

The above discussion has concentrated on automobile occupant sensing but the teachings, with some modifications, are applicable to monitoring of other vehicles including railroad cars, truck trailers and cargo containers.

6.3 Color and Natural Light

As discussed above, the use of multispectral imaging can be a significant aid in recognizing objects inside and outside of a vehicle. Two objects may not be separable under monochromic illumination yet be quite distinguishable when observed in color or with illumination from other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. Also, the identification of a particular individual is enhanced using near UV radiation, for example. Even low level X-rays can be useful in identifying and locating objects in a vehicle.

6.4 Radar

Particular mention should be made of the use of radar since novel inexpensive antennas and ultra wideband radars are now readily available. A scanning radar beam can be used in this implementation and the reflected signal is received by a phase array antenna to generate an image of the occupant for input into the appropriate pattern detection circuitry. The image is not very clear due to the longer wave lengths used and the difficulty in getting a small enough radar beam. The word circuitry as used herein includes, in addition to normal electronic circuits, a microprocessor and appropriate software.

Another preferred embodiment makes use of radio waves and a voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO). In this embodiment, the frequency of the oscillator is controlled through the use of a phase detector which adjusts the oscillator frequency so that exactly one half wave occupies the distance from the transmitter to the receiver via reflection off of the occupant. The adjusted frequency is thus inversely proportional to the distance from the transmitter to the occupant. Alternately, an FM phase discriminator can be used as known to those skilled in the art. These systems could be used in any of the locations illustrated in FIG. 5 as well as in the monitoring of other vehicle types.

In FIG. 6, a motion sensor 73 is arranged to detect motion of an occupying item on the seat 4 and the output thereof is input to the neural network 65. Motion sensors can utilize a micro-power impulse radar (MIR) system as disclosed, for example, in McEwan U.S. Pat. No. 5,361,070, as well as many other patents by the same inventor. Motion sensing is accomplished by monitoring a particular range from the sensor as disclosed in that patent. MIR is one form of radar which has applicability to occupant sensing and can be mounted, for example, at locations such as designated by reference numerals 6 and 8-10 in FIG. 7. It has an advantage over ultrasonic sensors in that data can be acquired at a higher speed and thus the motion of an occupant can be more easily tracked. The ability to obtain returns over the entire occupancy range is somewhat more difficult than with ultrasound resulting in a more expensive system overall. MIR has additional advantages over ultrasound in lack of sensitivity to temperature variation and has a comparable resolution to about 40 kHz ultrasound. Resolution comparable to higher frequency is feasible but has not been demonstrated. Additionally, multiple MIR sensors can be used when high speed tracking of the motion of an occupant during a crash is required since they can be individually pulsed without interfering with each, through time division multiplexing. MIR sensors are also particularly applicable to the monitoring of other vehicles and can be configured to provide a system that requires very low power and thus is ideal for use with battery-operated systems that require a very long life.

Sensors 126, 127, 128, 129 in FIG. 12 can also be microwave or mm wave radar sensors which transmit and receive radar waves. As such, it is possible to determine the presence of an object in the rear seat and the distance between the object and the sensors. Using multiple radar sensors, it would be possible to determine the contour of an object in the rear seat and thus using pattern recognition techniques, the classification or identification of the object. Motion of objects in the rear seat can also be determined using radar sensors. For example, if the radar sensors are directed toward a particular area and/or are provided with the ability to detect motion in a predetermined frequency range, they can be used to determine the presence of children or pets left in the vehicle, i.e., by detecting heartbeats or other body motions such as movement of the chest cavity.

6.5 Frequency or Spectrum Considerations

The maximum acoustic frequency range that is practical to use for acoustic imaging in the acoustic systems herein is about 40 to 160 kilohertz (kHz). The wavelength of a 50 kHz acoustic wave is about 0.6 cm, which is too coarse to determine the fine features of a person's face, for example. It is well understood by those skilled in the art that features that are smaller than the wavelength of the irradiating radiation cannot be distinguished. Similarly, the wavelength of common radar systems varies from about 0.9 cm (for 33 GHz K band) to 133 cm (for 225 MHz P band), which is also too coarse for person identification systems. Millimeter wave and sub-millimeter wave radar can of course emit and receive waves considerably smaller. Millimeter wave radar and Micropower Impulse Radar (MIR) as discussed above are particularly useful for occupant detection and especially the motion of occupants such as motion caused by heartbeats and breathing, but still too course for feature identification. For security purposes, for example, MIR can be used to detect the presence of weapons on a person that might be approaching a vehicle such as a bus, truck or train and thus provide a warning of a potential terrorist threat. Passive IR is also useful for this purpose.

MIR is reflected by edges, joints and boundaries and through the technique of range gating, particular slices in space can be observed. Millimeter wave radar, particularly in the passive mode, can also be used to locate life forms because they naturally emit waves at particular wave lengths such as 3 mm. A passive image of such a person will also show the presence of concealed weapons as they block this radiation. Similarly, active millimeter wave radar reflects off of metallic objects but is absorbed by the water in a life form. The absorption property can be used by placing a radar receiver or reflector behind the occupant and measuring the shadow caused by the absorption. The reflective property of weapons including plastics can be used as above to detect possible terrorist threats. Finally, the use of sub-millimeter waves again using a detector or reflector on the other side of the occupant can be used not only to determine the density of the occupant but also some measure of its chemical composition as the chemical properties alter the pulse shape. Such waves are more readily absorbed by water than by plastic. From the above discussion, it can be seen that there are advantages of using different frequencies of radar for different purposes and, in some cases, a combination of frequencies is most useful. This combination occurs naturally with noise radar (NR), ultra-wideband radar (UWB) and MIR and these technologies are most appropriate for occupant detection when using electromagnetic radiation at longer wavelengths than visible light and IR.

Another variant on the invention is to use no illumination source at all. In this case, the entire visible and infrared spectrum could be used. CMOS arrays are now available with very good night vision capabilities making it possible to see and image an occupant in very low light conditions. QWIP, as discussed above, may someday become available when on-chip cooling systems using a dual stage Peltier system become cost effective or when the operating temperature of the device rises through technological innovation. For a comprehensive introduction to multispectral imaging, see Richards, Austin Alien Vision, Exploring the Electromagnetic Spectrum with Imaging Technology, SPIE Press, 2001.

Thus many different frequencies can be used to image a scene each having particular advantages and disadvantages. At least one of the inventions disclosed herein is not limited to using a particular frequency or part of the electromagnetic spectrum and images can advantageously be combined from different frequencies. For example, a radar image can be combined or fused with an image from the infrared or ultraviolet portions of the spectrum. Additionally, the use of a swept frequency range such as in a chirp can be advantageously used to distinguish different objects or in some cases different materials. It is well known that different materials absorb and reflect different electromagnetic waves and that this fact can be used to identify the material as in spectrographic analysis.

7. Field Sensors and Antennas

A living object such as an animal or human has a fairly high electrical permittivity (Dielectric Constant) and relatively lossy dielectric properties (Loss Tangent) absorbs a lot of energy absorption when placed in an appropriate varying electric field. This effect varies with the frequency. If a human, which is a lossy dielectric, is present in the detection field, then the dielectric absorption causes the value of the capacitance of the object to change with frequency. For a human (poor dielectric) with high dielectric losses (loss tangent), the decay with frequency will be more pronounced than objects that do not present this high loss tangency. Exploiting this phenomena, it is possible to detect the presence of an adult, child, baby or pet that is in the field of the detection circuit.

In FIG. 6, a capacitive sensor 78 is arranged to detect the presence of an occupying item on the seat 4 and the output thereof is input to the neural network 65. Capacitive sensors can be located many other places in the passenger compartment. Capacitive sensors appropriate for this function are disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,602,734, 5,802,479, 5,844,486 and 5,948,031. Capacitive sensors can in general be mounted at locations designated by reference numerals 6 and 8-10 in FIG. 7 or as shown in FIG. 6 or in the vehicle seat and seatback, although by their nature they can occupy considerably more space than shown in the drawings.

In FIG. 4, transducers 5, 11, 12, 13, 14 and 15 can be antennas placed in the seat and headrest such that the presence of an object, particularly a water-containing object such as a human, disturbs the near field of the antenna. This disturbance can be detected by various means such as with Micrel parts MICREF102 and MICREF104, which have a built-in antenna auto-tune circuit. Note, these parts cannot be used as is and it is necessary to redesign the chips to allow the auto-tune information to be retrieved from the chip.

Note that the bio-impedance that can be measured using the methods described above can be used to obtain a measure of the water mass, for example, of an object and thus of its weight.

8. Telematics

Some of the inventions herein relate generally to telematics and the transmission of information from a vehicle to one or more remote sites which can react to the position or status of the vehicle and/or occupant(s) therein.

For example, the cellular phone system, or other telematics communication device, is shown schematically in FIG. 2 by box 34 and outputs to an antenna 32. The phone system or telematics communication device 34 can be coupled to the vehicle interior monitoring system in accordance with any of the embodiments disclosed herein and serves to establish a communications channel with one or more remote assistance facilities, such as an EMS facility or dispatch facility from which emergency response personnel are dispatched. The telematics system can also be a satellite-based system such as provided by Skybitz.

Additional details about this aspect of the invention are found in the '996 application, section 9.

9. Pattern Recognition

In basic embodiments of the inventions, wave or energy-receiving transducers are arranged in the vehicle at appropriate locations, associated algorithms are trained, if necessary depending on the particular embodiment, and function to determine whether a life form, or other object, is present in the vehicle and if so, how many life forms or objects are present. A determination can also be made using the transducers as to whether the life forms are humans, or more specifically, adults, child in child seats, etc. As noted above and below, this is possible using pattern recognition techniques. Moreover, the processor or processors associated with the transducers can be trained (loaded with a trained pattern recognition algorithm) to determine the location of the life forms or objects, either periodically or continuously or possibly only immediately before, during and after a crash. The location of the life forms or objects can be as general or as specific as necessary depending on the system requirements, i.e., a determination can be made that a human is situated on the driver's seat in a normal position (general) or a determination can be made that a human is situated on the driver's seat and is leaning forward and/or to the side at a specific angle as well as determining the position of his or her extremities and head and chest (specific). Or, a determination can be made as to the size or type of objects such as boxes are in a truck trailer or cargo container. The degree of detail is limited by several factors, including, e.g., the number, position and type of transducers and the training of the pattern recognition algorithm.

When different objects are placed on the front passenger seat, the images (here “image” is used to represent any form of signal) from transducers 6, 8, 10 (FIG. 1) are different for different objects but there are also similarities between all images of rear facing child seats, for example, regardless of where on the vehicle seat it is placed and regardless of what company manufactured the child seat. Alternately, there will be similarities between all images of people sitting on the seat regardless of what they are wearing, their age or size. The problem is to find the set of “rules” or an algorithm that differentiates the images of one type of object from the images of other types of objects, for example which differentiate the adult occupant images from the rear facing child seat images or boxes. The similarities of these images for various child seats are frequently not obvious to a person looking at plots of the time series from ultrasonic sensors, for example, and thus computer algorithms are developed to sort out the various patterns. For a more detailed discussion of pattern recognition see US RE37260.

The determination of these rules is important to the pattern recognition techniques used in at least one of the inventions disclosed herein. In general, three approaches have been useful, artificial intelligence, fuzzy logic and artificial neural networks including modular or combination neural networks. Other types of pattern recognition techniques may also be used, such as sensor fusion as disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,482,314, 5,890,085, and 6,249,729. In some of the inventions disclosed herein, such as the determination that there is an object in the path of a closing window or door using acoustics or optics as described herein, the rules are sufficiently obvious that a trained researcher can look at the returned signals and devise an algorithm to make the required determinations. In others, such as the determination of the presence of a rear facing child seat or of an occupant, artificial neural networks are used to determine the rules. Neural network software for determining the pattern recognition rules is available from various sources such as International Scientific Research, Inc., Panama City, Panama.

The human mind has little problem recognizing faces even when they are partially occluded such as with a hat, sunglasses or a scarf, for example. With the increase in low cost computing power, it is now becoming possible to train a rather large neural network, perhaps a combination neural network, to recognize most of those cases where a human mind will also be successful.

Other techniques which may or may not be part of the process of designing a system for a particular application include the following:

1. Fuzzy logic. Neural networks frequently exhibit the property that when presented with a situation that is totally different from any previously encountered, an irrational decision can result. Frequently, when the trained observer looks at input data, certain boundaries to the data become evident and cases that fall outside of those boundaries are indicative of either corrupted data or data from a totally unexpected situation. It is sometimes desirable for the system designer to add rules to handle these cases. These can be fuzzy logic-based rules or rules based on human intelligence. One example would be that when certain parts of the data vector fall outside of expected bounds that the system defaults to an airbag-enable state or the previously determined state.

2. Genetic algorithms. When developing a neural network algorithm for a particular vehicle, there is no guarantee that the best of all possible algorithms has been selected. One method of improving the probability that the best algorithm has been selected is to incorporate some of the principles of genetic algorithms. In one application of this theory, the network architecture and/or the node weights are varied pseudo-randomly to attempt to find other combinations which have higher success rates. The discussion of such genetic algorithms systems appears in the book Computational Intelligence referenced above.

Although neural networks are preferred other classifiers such as Bayesian classifiers can be used as well as any other pattern recognition system. A key feature of most of the inventions disclosed herein is the recognition that the technology of pattern recognition rather than deterministic mathematics should be applied to solving the occupant sensing problem.

9.1 Neural Networks

An occupant can move from a position safely displaced from the airbag to a position where he or she can be seriously injured by the deployment of an airbag within a fraction of a second during pre-crash braking, for example. On the other hand, it takes a substantially longer time period to change the seat occupancy state from a forward facing person to a rear facing child seat, or even from a forward facing child seat to a rear facing child seat. This fact can be used in the discrimination process through post-processing algorithms. One method, which also prepares for DOOP, is to use a two-layered neural network or two separate neural networks. The first one categorizes the seat occupancy into, for example, (1) empty seat, (2) rear facing child seat, (3) forward facing child seat and (4) forward facing human (not in a child seat). The second is used for occupant position determination. In the implementation, the same input layer can be used for both neural networks but separate hidden and output layers are used. This is illustrated in FIG. 187 of the '881 application which is similar to FIG. 15B of the '038 application with the addition of a post processing operation for both the categorization and position networks and the separate hidden layer nodes for each network.

If the categorization network determines that either a category (3) or (4) exists, then the second network is run, which determines the location of the occupant. Significant averaging of the vectors is used for the first network and substantial evidence is required before the occupancy class is changed. For example, if data is acquired every 10 milliseconds, the first network might be designed to require 600 out of 1000 changed vectors before a change of state is determined. In this case, at least 6 seconds of confirming data would be required. Such a system would therefore not be fooled by a momentary placement of a newspaper by a forward facing human, for example, that might look like a rear-facing child seat.

If, on the other hand, a forward facing human were chosen, his or her position could be determined every 10 milliseconds. A decision that the occupant had moved out of position would not necessarily be made from one 10 millisecond reading unless that reading was consistent with previous readings. Nevertheless, a series of consistent readings would lead to a decision within 10 milliseconds of when the occupant crossed over into the danger zone proximate to the airbag module. This method of using history is used to eliminate the effects of temperature gradients, for example, or other events that could temporarily distort one or more vectors. The algorithms which perform this analysis are part of the post-processor.

More particularly, in one embodiment of the method in accordance with at least one of the inventions herein in which two neural networks are used in the control of the deployment of an occupant restraint device based on the position of an object in a passenger compartment of a vehicle, several wave-emitting and receiving transducers are mounted on the vehicle. In one preferred embodiment, the transducers are ultrasonic transducers which simultaneously transmit and receive waves at different frequencies from one another. A determination is made by a first neural network whether the object is of a type requiring deployment of the occupant restraint device in the event of a crash involving the vehicle based on the waves received by at least some of the transducers after being modified by passing through the passenger compartment. If so, another determination is made by a second neural network whether the position of the object relative to the occupant restraint device would cause injury to the object upon deployment of the occupant restraint device based on the waves received by at least some of the transducers. The first neural network is trained on signals from at least some of the transducers representative of waves received by the transducers when different objects are situated in the passenger compartment. The second neural network is trained on signals from at least some of the transducers when different objects in different positions are situated in the passenger compartment.

The transducers used in the training of the first and second neural networks and operational use of method are not necessary the same transducers and different sets of transducers can be used for the typing or categorizing of the object via the first neural network and the position determination of the object via the second neural network.

The modifications described above with respect to the use of ultrasonic transducers can also be used in conjunction with a dual neural network system. For example, motion of a respective vibrating element or cone of one or more of the transducers may be electronically or mechanically diminished or suppressed to reduce ringing of the transducer and/or one or more of the transducers may be arranged in a respective tube having an opening through which the waves are transmitted and received.

In another embodiment of the invention, a method for categorizing and determining the position of an object in a passenger compartment of a vehicle entails mounting a plurality of wave-receiving transducers on the vehicle, training a first neural network on signals from at least some of the transducers representative of waves received by the transducers when different objects in different positions are situated in the passenger compartment, and training a second neural network on signals from at least some of the transducers representative of waves received by the transducers when different objects in different positions are situated in the passenger compartment. As such, the first neural network provides an output signal indicative of the categorization of the object while the second neural network provides an output signal indicative of the position of the object. The transducers may be controlled to transmit and receive waves each at a different frequency, as discussed herein, and one or more of the transducers may be arranged in a respective tube having an opening through which the waves are transmitted and received.

Although this system is described with particular advantageous use for ultrasonic and optical transducers, it is conceivable that other transducers other than the ultrasonics or optics can also be used in accordance with the invention. A dual neural network is a form of a modular neural network and both are subsets of combination neural networks.

The system used in a preferred implementation of at least one of the inventions disclosed herein for the determination of the presence of a rear facing child seat, of an occupant or of an empty seat, for example, is the artificial neural network, which is also commonly referred to as a trained neural network. In one case, illustrated in FIG. 1, the network operates on the returned signals as sensed by transducers 6, 8, 9 and 10, for example. Through a training session, the system is taught to differentiate between the different cases. This is done by conducting a large number of experiments where a selection of the possible child seats is placed in a large number of possible orientations on the front passenger seat. Similarly, a sufficiently large number of experiments are run with human occupants and with boxes, bags of groceries and other objects (both inanimate and animate). For each experiment with different objects and the same object in different positions, the returned signals from the transducers 6, 8, 9 and 10, for example, are associated with the identification of the occupant in the seat or the empty seat and information about the occupant such as its orientation if it is a child seat and/or position. Data sets are formed from the returned signals and the identification and information about the occupant or the absence of an occupant. The data sets are input into a neural network-generating program that creates a trained neural network that can, upon receiving input of returned signals from the transducers 6, 8, 9 and 10, provide an output of the identification and information about the occupant most likely situated in the seat or ascertained the existence of an empty seat. Sometimes as many as 1,000,000 such experiments are run before the neural network is sufficiently trained and tested so that it can differentiate among the several cases and output the correct decision with a very high probability. The data from each trial is combined to form a one-dimensional array of data called a vector. Of course, it must be realized that a neural network can also be trained to differentiate among additional cases, for example, a forward facing child seat. It can also be trained to recognize the existence of one or more boxes or other cargo within a truck trailer, cargo container, automobile trunk or railroad car, for example.

Considering now FIG. 9, the normalized data from the ultrasonic transducers 6, 8, 9 and 10, the seat track position detecting sensor 74, the reclining angle detecting sensor 57, from the weight sensor(s) 7, 76, from the heartbeat sensor 71, the capacitive sensor 78 and the motion sensor 73 are input to the neural network 65, and the neural network 65 is then trained on this data. More specifically, the neural network 65 adds up the normalized data from the ultrasonic transducers, from the seat track position detecting sensor 74, from the reclining angle detecting sensor 57, from the weight sensor(s) 7, 76, from the heartbeat sensor 71, from the capacitive sensor 78 and from the motion sensor 73 with each data point multiplied by an associated weight according to the conventional neural network process to determine correlation function (step S6 in FIG. 11).

The neural network 65 recognizes the seated-state of a passenger A by training. Then, after training the seated-state of the passenger A and developing the neural network weights, the system is tested. The training procedure and the test procedure of the neural network 65 will hereafter be described with a flowchart shown in FIG. 11.

The threshold value of each data point is determined by multiplying weight coefficients and summing up the results in sequence, and the aforementioned training process is to determine a weight coefficient Wj so that the threshold value (ai) is a previously determined output.

ai=ΣWj·Xj (j=1 to N)

wherein Wj is the weight coefficient,

-   -   Xj is the data and     -   N is the number of samples.

Based on this result of the training, the neural network 65 generates the weights for the coefficients of the correlation function or the algorithm (step S7).

At the time the neural network 65 has learned a suitable number of patterns of the training data, the result of the training is tested by the test data. In the case where the rate of correct answers of the seated-state detecting unit based on this test data is unsatisfactory, the neural network is further trained and the test is repeated. In this embodiment, the test was performed based on about 600,000 test patterns. When the rate of correct test result answers was at about 98%, the training was ended. Further improvements to the ultrasonic occupant sensor system has now resulted in accuracies exceeding 98% and for the optical system exceeding 99%.

The neural network software operates as follows. The training data is used to determine the weights which multiply the values at the various nodes at the lower level when they are combined at nodes at a higher level. Once a sufficient number of iterations have been accomplished, the independent data is used to check the network. If the accuracy of the network using the independent data is lower than the last time that it was checked using the independent data, then the previous weights are substituted for the new weights and training of the network continues on a different path. Thus, although the independent data is not used to train the network, it does strongly affect the weights. It is therefore not really independent. Also, both the training data and the independent data are created so that all occupancy states are roughly equally represented. As a result, a third set of data is used which is structured to more closely represent the real world of vehicle occupancy. This third data set, the “real world” data, is then used to arrive at a figure as to the real accuracy of the system.

The neural network 65 has outputs 65 a, 65 b and 65 c (FIG. 9). Each of the outputs 65 a, 65 b and 65 c outputs a signal of logic 0 or 1 to a gate circuit or algorithm 77. Based on the signals from the outputs 65 a, 65 b and 65 c, any one of these combination (100), (010) and (001) is obtained. In another preferred embodiment, all data for the empty seat was removed from the training set and the empty seat case was determined based on the output of the weight sensor alone. This simplifies the neural network and improves its accuracy.

In this embodiment, the output (001) correspond to a vacant seat, a seat occupied by an inanimate object or a seat occupied by a pet (VACANT), the output (010) corresponds to a rear facing child seat (RFCS) or an abnormally seated passenger (ASP or OOPA), and the output (100) corresponds to a normally seated passenger (NSP or FFA) or a forward facing child seat (FFCS).

The gate circuit (seated-state evaluation circuit) 77 can be implemented by an electronic circuit or by a computer algorithm by those skilled in the art and the details will not be presented here. The function of the gate circuit 77 is to remove the ambiguity that sometimes results when ultrasonic sensors and seat position sensors alone are used. This ambiguity is that it is sometimes difficult to differentiate between a rear facing child seat (RFCS) and an abnormally seated passenger (ASP), or between a normally seated passenger (NSP) and a forward facing child seat (FFCS). By the addition of one or more weight sensors in the function of acting as a switch when the weight is above or below 60 lbs., it has been found that this ambiguity can be eliminated. The gate circuit therefore takes into account the output of the neural network and also the weight from the weight sensor(s) as being above or below 60 lbs. and thereby separates the two cases just described and results in five discrete outputs.

The use of weight data must be heavily filtered since during driving conditions, especially on rough roads or during an accident, the weight sensors will give highly varying output. The weight sensors, therefore, are of little value during the period of time leading up to and including a crash and their influence must be minimized during this time period. One way of doing this is to average the data over a long period of time such as from 5 seconds to a minute or more.

Thus, the gate circuit 77 fulfills a role of outputting five kinds of seated-state evaluation signals, based on a combination of three kinds of evaluation signals from the neural network 65 and superimposed information from the weight sensor(s). The five seated-state evaluation signals are input to an airbag deployment determining circuit that is part of the airbag system and will not be described here. Output of this system can also be used to activate a variety of lights or alarms to indicate to the operator of the vehicle the seated state of the passenger. The system that has been described here for the passenger side is also applicable for the most part for the driver side.

An alternate and preferred method of accomplishing the function performed by the gate circuit is to use a modular neural network. In this case, the first level neural network is trained on determining whether the seat is occupied or vacant. The input to this neural network consists of all of the data points described above. Since the only function of this neural network is to ascertain occupancy, the accuracy of this neural network is very high. If this neural network determines that the seat is not vacant, then the second level neural network determines the occupancy state of the seat.

In this embodiment, although the neural network 65 has been employed as an evaluation circuit, the mapping data of the coefficients of a correlation function may also be implemented or transferred to a microcomputer to constitute the evaluation circuit (see Step S8 in FIG. 11).

According to the seated-state detecting unit of the present invention, the identification of a vacant seat (VACANT), a rear facing child seat (RFCS), a forward facing child seat (FFCS), a normally seated adult passenger (NSP), an abnormally seated adult passenger (ASP), can be reliably performed. Based on this identification, it is possible to control a component, system or subsystem in the vehicle. For example, a regulation valve which controls the inflation or deflation of an airbag may be controlled based on the evaluated identification of the occupant of the seat. This regulation valve may be of the digital or analog type. A digital regulation valve is one that is in either of two states, open or closed. The control of the flow is then accomplished by varying the time that the valve is open and closed, i.e., the duty cycle.

The neural network has been previously trained on a significant number of occupants of the passenger compartment. The number of such occupants depends strongly on whether the driver or the passenger seat is being analyzed. The variety of seating states or occupancies of the passenger seat is vastly greater than that of the driver seat. For the driver seat, a typical training set will consist of approximately 100 different vehicle occupancies. For the passenger seat, this number can exceed 1000. These numbers are used for illustration purposes only and will differ significantly from vehicle model to vehicle model. Of course many vectors of data will be taken for each occupancy as the occupant assumes different positions and postures.

The neural network is now used to determine which of the stored occupancies most closely corresponds to the measured data. The output of the neural network can be an index of the setup that was used during training that most closely matches the current measured state. This index can be used to locate stored information from the matched trained occupancy. Information that has been stored for the trained occupancy typically includes the locus of the centers of the chest and head of the driver, as well as the approximate radius of pixels which is associated with this center to define the head area, for example. For the case of FIG. 8A, it is now known from this exercise where the head, chest, and perhaps the eyes and ears, of the driver are most likely to be located and also which pixels should be tracked in order to know the precise position of the driver's head and chest. What has been described above is the identification process for automobile occupancy and is only representative of the general process. A similar procedure, although usually simpler with fewer steps, is applicable to other vehicle monitoring cases.

The use of trainable pattern recognition technologies such as neural networks is an important part of the some of the inventions discloses herein particularly for the automobile occupancy case, although other non-trained pattern recognition systems such as fuzzy logic, correlation, Kalman filters, and sensor fusion can also be used. These technologies are implemented using computer programs to analyze the patterns of examples to determine the differences between different categories of objects. These computer programs are derived using a set of representative data collected during the training phase, called the training set. After training, the computer programs output a computer algorithm containing the rules permitting classification of the objects of interest based on the data obtained after installation in the vehicle. These rules, in the form of an algorithm, are implemented in the system that is mounted onto the vehicle. The determination of these rules is important to the pattern recognition techniques used in at least one of the inventions disclosed herein. Artificial neural networks using back propagation are thus far the most successful of the rule determination approaches, however, research is underway to develop systems with many of the advantages of back propagation neural networks, such as learning by training, without the disadvantages, such as the inability to understand the network and the possibility of not converging to the best solution. In particular, back propagation neural networks will frequently give an unreasonable response when presented with data than is not within the training data. It is well known that neural networks are good at interpolation but poor at extrapolation. A combined neural network fuzzy logic system, on the other hand, can substantially solve this problem. Additionally, there are many other neural network systems in addition to back propagation. In fact, one type of neural network may be optimum for identifying the contents of the passenger compartment and another for determining the location of the object dynamically.

Numerous books and articles, including more that 500 U.S. patents, describe neural networks in great detail and thus the theory and application of this technology is well known and will not be repeated here. Except in a few isolated situations where neural networks have been used to solve particular problems limited to engine control, for example, they have not previously been applied to automobiles, trucks or other vehicle monitoring situations.

The system generally used in the instant invention, therefore, for the determination of the presence of a rear facing child seat, an occupant, or an empty seat is the artificial neural network or a neural-fuzzy system. In this case, the network operates on the returned signals from a CCD or CMOS array as sensed by transducers 49, 50, 51 and 54 in FIG. 8D, for example. For the case of the front passenger seat, for example, through a training session, the system is taught to differentiate between the three cases. This is done by conducting a large number of experiments where available child seats are placed in numerous positions and orientations on the front passenger seat of the vehicle.

Once the network is determined, it is possible to examine the result to determine, from the algorithm created by the neural network software, the rules that were finally arrived at by the trial and error training technique. In that case, the rules can then be programmed into a microprocessor. Alternately, a neural computer can be used to implement the neural network directly. In either case, the implementation can be carried out by those skilled in the art of pattern recognition using neural networks. If a microprocessor is used, a memory device is also required to store the data from the analog to digital converters which digitize the data from the receiving transducers. On the other hand, if a neural network computer is used, the analog signal can be fed directly from the transducers to the neural network input nodes and an intermediate memory is not required. Memory of some type is needed to store the computer programs in the case of the microprocessor system and if the neural computer is used for more than one task, a memory is needed to store the network specific values associated with each task.

A review of the literature on neural networks yields the conclusion that the use of such a large training set is unique in the neural network field. The rule of thumb for neural networks is that there must be at least three training cases for each network weight. Thus, for example, if a neural network has 156 input nodes, 10 first hidden layer nodes, 5 second hidden layer nodes, and one output node this results in a total of 1,622 weights. According to conventional theory 5000 training examples should be sufficient. It is highly unexpected, therefore, that greater accuracy would be achieved through 100 times that many cases. It is thus not obvious and cannot be deduced from the neural network literature that the accuracy of the system will improve substantially as the size of the training database increases even to tens of thousands of cases. It is also not obvious looking at the plots of the vectors obtained using ultrasonic transducers that increasing the number of tests or the database size will have such a significant effect on the system accuracy. Each of the vectors is typically a rather course plot with a few significant peaks and valleys. Since the spatial resolution of an ultrasonic system is typically about 2 to 4 inches, it is once again surprising that such a large database is required to achieve significant accuracy improvements.

The back propagation neural network is a very successful general-purpose network. However, for some applications, there are other neural network architectures that can perform better. If it has been found, for example, that a parallel network as described above results in a significant improvement in the system, then, it is likely that the particular neural network architecture chosen has not been successful in retrieving all of the information that is present in the data. In such a case, an RCE, Stochastic, Logicon Projection, cellular, support vector machine or one of the other approximately 30 types of neural network architectures can be tried to see if the results improve. This parallel network test, therefore, is a valuable tool for determining the degree to which the current neural network is capable of using efficiently the available data.

One of the salient features of neural networks is their ability of find patterns in data regardless of its source. Neural networks work well with data from ultrasonic sensors, optical imagers, strain gage and bladder weight sensors, temperature sensors, chemical sensors, radiation sensors, pressure sensors, electric field sensors, capacitance based sensors, any other wave sensors including the entire electromagnetic spectrum, etc. If data from any sensors can be digitized and fed into a neural network generating program and if there is information in the pattern of the data then neural networks can be a viable method of identifying those patterns and correlating them with a desired output function. Note that although the inventions disclosed herein preferably use neural networks and combination neural networks to be described next, these inventions are not limited to this form or method of pattern recognition. The major breakthrough in occupant sensing came with the recognition by the current assignee that ordinary analysis using mathematical equations where the researcher looks at the data and attempts, based on the principles of statistics, engineering or physics, to derive the relevant relationships between the data and the category and location of an occupying item, is not the proper approach and that pattern recognition technologies should be used. This is believed to be the first use of such pattern recognition technologies in the automobile safety and monitoring fields with the exception that neural networks have been used by the current assignee and others as the basis of a crash sensor algorithm and by certain automobile manufacturers for engine control. Note for many monitoring situations in truck trailers, cargo containers and railroad cars where questions such as “is there anything in the vehicle?” are asked, neural networks may not always be required.

9.2 Interpretation of Other Occupant States

Once a vehicle interior monitoring system employing a sophisticated pattern recognition system, such as a neural network or modular neural network, is in place, it is possible to monitor the motions of the driver over time and determine if he is falling asleep or has otherwise become incapacitated. In such an event, the vehicle can be caused to respond in a number of different ways. One such system is illustrated in FIG. 6 and consists of a monitoring system having transducers 8 and 9 plus microprocessor 20 programmed to compare the motions of the driver over time and trained to recognize changes in behavior representative of becoming incapacitated e.g., the eyes blinking erratically and remaining closed for ever longer periods of time. If the system determines that there is a reasonable probability that the driver has fallen asleep, for example, then it can turn on a warning light shown here as 41 or send a warning sound. If the driver fails to respond to the warning by pushing an inattentiveness response button 43 or reset button, for example, then the horn and lights can be operated in a manner to warn other vehicles and the vehicle brought to a stop. One novel approach, not shown, would be to use the horn as the button 43. For a momentary depression of the horn, for this case, the horn would not sound. Other responses can also be programmed and other tests of driver attentiveness can be used, without resorting to attempting to monitor the motions of the driver's eyes that would signify that the driver was alert. These other responses can include an input to the steering wheel, motion of the head, blinking or other motion of the eyes etc. In fact, by testing a large representative sample of the population of drivers, the range of alert responses to the warning light and/or sound can be compared to the lack of response of a sleeping driver and thereby the state of attentiveness determined.

Accordingly, one embodiment of a system for monitoring a driver includes an optical imaging system which obtains images of the driver including the driver's head and monitors the head of the driver, i.e., monitors its position and change in position, and determines whether he is paying attention to driving or is incapacitated, i.e., dead, falling asleep, sleeping, drunk, unconscious. Optical imagers or cameras may be arranged around the driver, spaced apart from one another, and to obtain images of the front of the driver and including the driver's face, of a side of the driver or of a back of the driver. The driver's head in its entirety may be monitored and/or one or more parts thereof, i.e., the driver's eyes or the driver's eye lids. Also, only one or more parts of the driver's head may be monitored without monitoring the head in its entirety. In some cases, an additional imaging device may be used in view of the increased difficulty in monitoring specific parts of the driver's head or face, e.g., the driver's eyes and/or eye lids, from a primary imaging device which is preferably arranged in the headliner (see transducers 8, 9 in FIG. 4) where it may not have the best view of the driver's face or facial features such as the eyes and eye lids.

Analysis of the position of the driver's head may be understood to mean its change in position from one image to another image taken at a different time and/or its position in relative to a fixed part of the frame of the vehicle. By analyzing the position of the driver's head, it is also possible to determine the probable direction of the driver's gaze. This determination may also be made using a trained pattern recognition technique such as but not limited to a neural network. It is recognized that people may look momentarily at specific objects exterior of the vehicle by moving their eyes only, but for longer gazes (which are most likely representative of motion of the driver's head which is of interest, i.e., the driver falling asleep or otherwise being unable to operate the vehicle), the driver will generally rotate his or her head in its entirety. Thus, the position of the head becomes an important indicator of where the driver is looking or gazing and in particular if he or she is not looking straight ahead at the road. A drooping or thrown-back head, for example, would be particularly easy to identify when monitoring the driver's head position and changes thereof. Monitoring of the driver's gaze though may preferably include consideration of the road on which the vehicle is travelling, obtained from for example a vehicle-resident map database accessible by the processor, because rotation of the driver's head may be required to follow a curving road. This is further discussed below.

Once the monitoring system, and primarily the processor 20, determines that there is a problem with the driver's attention, then it may perform at least one test such as providing an audio or visual cue requesting the driver to take some action in response to the cue to indicate that they are not falling asleep or incapacitated and thus able to continue to operate the vehicle. This action may be the control of, actuation or and/or reaction to one or more reactive components in the vehicle. For example, the action could be depressing the horn button (one reactive component), shifting the driver's gaze to the road ahead, moving the steering wheel, depressing the brake or any other such action that indicates that he or she is responding to the cue. The response time can then be measured, i.e., by the reactive component itself and/or by processor, and a measurement of his alertness made.

Since people differ in their operation of a vehicle and response times, there will likely be some training of the processor required, e.g., training of the pattern recognition technique therein. That is, the processor may be programmed to vary the acceptable response time indicative of alertness of a driver for different drivers, so that one response time for one driver may be acceptable while the same response time for another driver may be indicative of that driver being incapacitated. Moreover, the direction of the road ahead can be determined soon after driving begins as the driver will most likely be looking at the road at least at the start of his trip and for most of his driving time. Tracking the head from that point forward, based even on a camera overhead, is expected to be relatively easy and the direction of gaze determined. Although it would be beneficial to also monitor the driver's eyes or eye lids, it may not justify the cost of a special, additional system just for that purpose. Of course, the driver can fall asleep with his gaze unchanged so in addition to motion of the driver's head, motion of the steering wheel, the position of the vehicle relative to the lane (as determined from an outside looking camera) may be monitored and analyzed in combination therewith to enable a determination of the driver's ability to operate the vehicle.

Other training of the processor or pattern recognition technique used thereby can involve motion statistics that lead to an expectation as to what a particular driver does when he is alert. If the driver passes the test, then the thresholds can be modified. In particular, as a person begins to fall asleep, he can execute some jerking motions or other telltale motions that will be different from his normal alert behavior. Any such out-of-the-ordinary movements can evoke the test of his response time. Such unordinary movements can be programmed into the trained pattern recognition technique in the processor, i.e., embodied on computer-readable medium accessible by the processor, so that once one of these movements is detected by the pattern recognition technique in the processor, the processor would control the reactive component(s) accordingly, or otherwise monitor detection of a response to cue or other required response by the driver indicating alertness.

Although optical monitoring of the driver's head or part thereof is most likely to enable an adequate determination of whether the driver is falling asleep or otherwise unable to operate the vehicle, other types of systems for monitoring the driver may be used alone or in combination with the optical monitoring system, including ultrasonic sensors, electric field sensors, bladder sensors, heartbeat sensors, respiration sensors and/or strain gage weight sensors to aid in this determination. In this case, the processor would be coupled to, for example, the strain gage weight sensors which provide an indication of the weight distribution of the occupant, and would analyze both the images obtained by the optical imaging system and the data provided by the strain gage weight sensors in order to make the determination of the driver's ability to operate the vehicle. Also, a liquid-filled bladder could be placed in contact with the driver on the seat and the heart rate and breathing can be monitored thereby (see, e.g., U.S. Pat. No. 3,727,606), and/or an EKG can be picked up with conductors put into the seat surface (see, e.g., U.S. Pat. No. 3,954,100). These would provide additional data for use by the processor when making the determination as to whether the driver is falling asleep or otherwise unable to operate the vehicle. Any such sensors may be coupled by wiring or wirelessly to the processor.

Additional data for use by the processor may include data from an accelerometer arranged in seatbelt and coupled to the processor. Such an accelerometer is designed to measure the heartbeat and/or respiration of the driver which could be correlated to and used in a determination by the processor that the driver is falling asleep or otherwise unable to operate the vehicle. Further, the precise motion of the chest of the occupant may be determined using a laser, for example, arranged in front of the driver, e.g., in the dashboard. The laser would also be coupled to the processor which would use the data from the laser in its determination of the attentiveness or alertness of the driver. This could be a low cost way of monitoring respiration of the driver, which is correlated to the driver's ability to operate the vehicle.

As for additional or alternative reactive components to the audible and visual devices described above, the processor which makes the determination of the driver's ability to operate the vehicle may also be arranged to control a system which generates a cue such as an audio request for the driver to “look at the road”, generates a rumble strip sound over the speakers in the vehicle and/or generates a vibration of the seat and/or steering wheel. When people run over a rumble strip, the natural reaction would be to look at the road. In that case, the driver would not have to be trained to, for example, depress the horn button. If he or she shifted his or her gaze in response to the rumble strip noise, that would be a sufficient response and the reaction time can be measured. Thus, the continued monitoring of the driver's head by the processor after the determination of the driver's inability to operate the vehicle is used to determine the driver having regained the ability to operate the vehicle.

Other reactive components may be coupled to the processor and perform cognitive tests including requiring an oral response, visual response or gesture response, for example, to the cue. Thus, the reactive component may be one which requires feedback from the driver, i.e., a detection of speech. In other words, if the driver is already looking at the road, then he can orally tell the system that he is awake and attentive.

9.3 Modifications

Some of the applications above have been based on the idea of training a neural network or modular neural network (MNN) and then installing it in the vehicle where it does not change. When determining whether a driver is asleep or otherwise incapacitated and unable to operate a vehicle, it would be beneficial to be able to compare an individual's behavior over time but it is difficult to make a special training session for each individual. Such a training session for each driver of the vehicle is within the scope of the invention and may be useful when a particular driver is the sole or one of the few drivers of a vehicle, such as for municipal transportation systems. In other situations, some of the parameters of the neural network can be made adaptive, that is they change over time as the system adapts to a particular individual.

The trained pattern recognition technique applied by the processor may be trained on all measures of occupant behavior that might indicate driver attentiveness or lack thereof while driving, i.e., whether the vehicle is moving or not. For example, vehicle parameters may also be analyzed such as acceleration, steering wheel angle, angular motion of the vehicle, etc. This would be especially useful if accurate maps were available so that it is known where the vehicle is relative to the lane boundaries. The attempted running of stop lights and stop signs of course would be a clear indication of lack of attentiveness that can be used if maps or an external viewing camera were present. Probe vehicles may be used to map roads for attentiveness purposes, so that once a map is obtained and installed on the vehicle, the processor may access the map and determine whether a change in the driver's head position or use of the steering wheel is the result of the driver falling asleep or simply following a curvature in the road. If a map is not available, then the processor could be designed to include the motions of drivers on the same stretch of road and then measure the driving behavior of the driver compared with the other vehicle drivers on the same stretch of road to determine inattentiveness. The expected behavior of a driver on a stretch of road may even be included in the map.

Another factor that might be considered by the processor is odor. Some suggest that a person emits particular chemicals either from the mouth or skin when he is about to die or fall asleep. Providing the vehicle with an odor sensor to sense such odors and then factoring the sensing of such odors into the determination by the processor would improve the determination of whether the driver is falling asleep or otherwise unable to operate the vehicle.

The pattern recognition technique would also need to consider distractions or course need during the training stage. The pattern recognition technique may optionally be trained to analyze the movement of multiple parts of the driver, which parts are all included in the images obtained by the optical imaging system when present. Thus, the processor may be arranged to determine the location of the driver's eyes, pupils, eye lids and head and analyze movement or motion of any combination of these, e.g., eye blinks, pupil diameter and changes therein, gaze variation, head movement and eyelid movement. The processor may also be arranged to analyze face motion or other clues that the driver's eyes are closed. There are other clues in facial motion, or lack thereof, that someone's eyes are closed even if the eyes are not identified in the obtained images. Edge detection may be used by the processor to find and recognize the face form the images obtained by the optical imaging system.

The processor may also be arranged to track the driver's head using an artificial neural network (ANN) and a head model. This would require the determination of the location of one or two recognizable points on the head and from a model, the processor could determine whether every part of the driver's head is, e.g., the driver's eyes or eye lids.

Another factor to be used by the processor is the amount of time when driver is not looking at the road ahead. If this exceeds, e.g., 2 seconds, then the processor could use this factor in its determination of inattentiveness. Yet another factor is head orientation which may be determined by analysis of the images of the driver. Most of the time the driver is looking forward, so the position in which the driver's head is in most of the time may be considered the normal position and variations from this position for an extended period of time may be indicative of the driver's inattentiveness.

Numerous studies have shown that changes in steering activity are correlated with driver state of impairment. Monitoring vehicle output as reflected by control of the steering wheel, rather than driver actions, is a less obtrusive test and may be combined with the optical monitoring systems described above. Without a map, the system can be fooled by heavy traffic or a winding road. Nevertheless, if the reactive component is a simulated rumble strip sound and the driver quickly reacts, then it is known that the driver is alert and the road is at fault. The threshold for steering, for example, can then be temporarily changed.

An even more sophisticated system of monitoring the behavior of the driver is to track his eye motions using such techniques as are described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,648,052, 4,720,189, 4,836,670, 4,950,069, 5,008,946 and 5,305,012. Detection of the impaired driver in particular can be best determined by these techniques. These systems use pattern recognition techniques plus, in many cases, the transmitter and CCD receivers must be appropriately located so that the reflection off of the cornea of the driver's eyes can be detected as discussed in above-referenced patents. The size of the CCD arrays used herein permits their location, sometimes in conjunction with a reflective windshield, where this corneal reflection can be detected with some difficulty. Sunglasses or other items can interfere with this process.

In a similar manner as described in these patents, the motion of the driver's eyes can be used to control various systems in the vehicle permitting hands off control of the entertainment system, heating and air conditioning system or all of the other systems described above. Although some of these systems have been described in the afore-mentioned patents, none have made use of neural networks for interpreting the eye movements. The use of particular IR wavelengths permits the monitoring of the driver's eyes without the driver knowing that this is occurring. IR with a wave length above about 1.1 microns, however, is blocked by glass eyeglasses and thus other invisible frequencies may be required.

The use of the windshield as a reflector is particularly useful when monitoring the eyes of the driver by means of a camera mounted on the rear view mirror assembly. The reflections from the cornea are highly directional, as every driver knows whose lights have reflected off the eyes of an animal on the roadway. For this to be effective, the eyes of the driver must be looking at the radiation source. Since the driver is presumably looking through the windshield, the source of the radiation must also come from the windshield and the reflections from the driver's eyes must also be in the direction of the windshield. Using this technique, the time that the driver spends looking through the windshield can be monitored and if that time drops below some threshold value, it can be presumed that the driver is not attentive and may be sleeping or otherwise incapacitated.

The location of the eyes of the driver, for this application, is greatly facilitated by the teachings of the inventions as described above. Although others have suggested the use of eye motions and corneal reflections for drowsiness determination, up until now there has not been a practical method for locating the driver's eyes with sufficient precision and reliability as to render this technique practical. Also, although sunglasses might defeat such a system, most drowsiness caused accidents happen at night when it is less likely that sunglasses are worn.

9.4 Other Aspects

Various modifications to pattern recognition techniques are described in sections 11.4, 11.5, 11.6. 11.7 and 11.8 of the '996 application, including for example pre-processing of data prior to analysis to derive information from the data, post-processing of output from a pattern recognition system to improve the value of the output and use of a single imager optical occupant classification system.

10. Summary

Although several preferred embodiments are illustrated and described above, there are possible combinations using other signals and sensors for the components and different forms of the neural network implementation or different pattern recognition technologies that perform the same functions which can be utilized in accordance with the invention. Also, although the neural network and modular neural networks have been described as an example of one means of pattern recognition, other pattern recognition means exist and still others are being developed which can be used to identify potential component failures by comparing the operation of a component over time with patterns characteristic of normal and abnormal component operation. In addition, with the pattern recognition system described above, the input data to the system may be data which has been pre-processed rather than the raw signal data either through a process called “feature extraction” or by various mathematical transformations. Also, any of the apparatus and methods disclosed herein may be used for diagnosing the state of operation or a plurality of discrete components.

Although several preferred embodiments are illustrated and described above, there are possible combinations using other geometries, sensors, materials and different dimensions for the components that perform the same functions. At least one of the inventions disclosed herein is not limited to the above embodiments and should be determined by the following claims. There are also numerous additional applications in addition to those described above. Many changes, modifications, variations and other uses and applications of the subject invention will, however, become apparent to those skilled in the art after considering this specification and the accompanying drawings which disclose the preferred embodiments thereof. All such changes, modifications, variations and other uses and applications which do not depart from the spirit and scope of the invention are deemed to be covered by the invention which is limited only by the following claims. 

1. A vehicle including a system for monitoring a driver of the vehicle, comprising a frame; an optical imaging system arranged on said frame to obtain images of the driver; a processor coupled to said optical imaging system and arranged to analyze the images obtained by said optical imaging system to locate a head of the driver in the images and monitor the driver's head or a part thereof over time, said processor being further arranged to determine, based on the monitoring of the driver's head or part thereof, whether the driver has lost the ability to operate the vehicle, the lost of ability to operate the vehicle arising from the driver falling asleep or otherwise being incapacitated; and a reactive component arranged on the vehicle which is affected by the determination by said processor that the driver has lost the ability to operate the vehicle, said reactive component requiring action by the driver to indicate regaining of the ability to operate the vehicle or exerting control over the vehicle to slow the vehicle and bring it to a stop.
 2. The vehicle of claim 1, wherein said processor is arranged to use a trained pattern recognition technique to locate the head of the driver.
 3. The vehicle of claim 1, wherein said optical imaging system comprises a plurality of optical imagers spaced apart from one another and each positioned to obtain images of a face of the driver.
 4. The vehicle of claim 1, wherein said processor monitors the driver's head by determining a position of the head of the driver in images obtained at different times and analyzing the determined position of the head of the driver in the different images.
 5. The vehicle of claim 1, wherein said processor monitors the driver's eyes by determining a position of the eyes of the driver in images obtained at different times and analyzing the determined position of the eyes of the driver in the different images.
 6. The vehicle of claim 1, wherein said processor monitors the driver's eye lids by determining a position of the eye lids of the driver in images obtained at different times and analyzing the determined position of the eye lids of the driver in the different images.
 7. The vehicle of claim 1, wherein said reactive component comprises a warning light or a warning sound generating device.
 8. The vehicle of claim 1, wherein said reactive component comprises a button which, when pressed, indicates that the driver has regained the ability to operate the vehicle.
 9. The vehicle of claim 1, further comprising a horn and lights, said processor being arranged to operate said horn and lights to warn other vehicles of the inability of the driver to operate the vehicle.
 10. A method for monitoring operation of a vehicle by a driver, comprising: obtaining images of the driver from at least one vehicle-mounted optical imager; analyzing the obtained images to locate a head of the driver in the images; monitoring the driver's head or a part thereof over time; determining, based on the monitoring of the driver's head or part thereof, whether the driver has lost the ability to operate the vehicle, the lost of ability to operate the vehicle arising from the driver falling asleep or otherwise being incapacitated; and upon a determination that the driver has lost the ability to operate the vehicle, affecting a reactive component which requires action by the driver to indicate regaining of the ability to operate the vehicle or exerts control over the vehicle to slow the vehicle and bring it to a stop.
 11. The method of claim 10, wherein the step of monitoring the driver's head or a part thereof over time comprises training a pattern recognition technique to locate the head of the driver.
 12. The method of claim 10, wherein the step of obtaining images of the driver comprises providing a plurality of optical imagers spaced apart from one another and positioning each of the optical imagers to obtain images of a face of the driver.
 13. The method of claim 10, wherein the step of monitoring the driver's head or a part thereof over time comprises determining a position of the head of the driver in images obtained at different times and analyzing the determined position of the head of the driver in the different images.
 14. The method of claim 10, wherein the step of monitoring the driver's head or a part thereof over time comprises monitoring the driver's eyes.
 15. The method of claim 14, wherein the step of monitoring the driver's eyes comprises determining a position of the eyes of the driver in images obtained at different times and analyzing the determined position of the eyes of the driver in the different images.
 16. The method of claim 10, wherein the step of monitoring the driver's head or a part thereof over time comprises monitoring the driver's eye lids.
 17. The method of claim 16, wherein the step of monitoring the driver's eyes comprises determining a position of the eye lids of the driver in images obtained at different times and analyzing the determined position of the eye lids of the driver in the different images.
 18. The method of claim 10, wherein the reactive component comprises a warning light or a warning sound generating device.
 19. The method of claim 10, wherein the reactive component comprises a button which, when pressed, indicates that the driver has regained the ability to operate the vehicle.
 20. The method of claim 10, further comprising operating a horn and lights to warn other vehicles of the inability of the driver to operate the vehicle. 